


HUX IMPERATOR

by Avilthenaze



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: (due to absorption of chemicals), (kind of), Blow Jobs, Docking, Emperor Hux, First Time, Kylo likes to undress Hux, M/M, Post-Canon, Power Play, Size Difference, Size Kink, Slow Burn, Small Penis, Stripping, The Force, fascists in love, hux works too much
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-01-01
Updated: 2018-01-25
Packaged: 2019-02-26 10:46:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 25,779
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13234059
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Avilthenaze/pseuds/Avilthenaze
Summary: “Let me formulate this clearly,” Ren said, walking around the room, away from the light. That way his body was veiled in shadows. “You think that I should enthrone myself by enthroning you.”The air felt denser inside the cabin and the usual hum of the machinery seemed to fall away. Hux sounded out of breath when he answered “Yes.”Kylo Ren has become the Supreme Leader of the First Order but has no ambition to put the title to any use. He waits, for violence, resolution and maybe death. Hux accepts the role of advisor in hopes that he can scheme his way into ruling the whole thing by whispering in the ear of the highly unstable and dangerous new leader.Ren refuses to take part in an official enthronement ceremony, but Hux felt he has prepared for it all his life. Will they be able to stop the First Order from collapsing on itself while their command is nothing but manipulation, power play, and an intimacy neither of them bargained for?





	1. The Vizier

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place after the events of The Last Jedi. It will become explicit in later chapters and tags will be updated accordingly to reflect it.  
> I don't have a beta reader, so I apologize in advance for any typo. Happy New Year everyone!

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even if General Hux was rarely on the battlefield, he felt he was fighting with his body far beyond what a regular Stormtrooper was expected to do. He worked 18 hours a day on average, and was not able to sleep for 5 hours straight because it was too long a window not to be aware of what was going on. So he took two 2.5 hours breaks, swallowing pills to drop asleep in seconds and not waste any precious time. He didn’t dream anymore. He woke to a sound designed to be so stressful that the temptation to remain on one’s cot was unthinkable. He also took pills to remain on edge at almost all times. They sometimes made his heart beat with a strange rhythm. The last hour of the day was divided equally between his other elementary bodily needs: twenty minutes for nutrition, itself divided in four 5 minutes slots, 20 minutes for strenuous physical activity, and 20 minutes for personal grooming. So it was a personal affair to ensure that the state of war reached its end as soon as possible. His survival depended on it heavily.

And that was without considering that he had been brought down to his knees, force choked and slammed into a wall in the last 24 hours, and that the leader of their military organisation had been cut in half on his throne, leaving space for utter chaos to swallow them.

So when they were back on board the Finalizer, the rebels scattering in the galaxy like ants, and Ren asked to speak to him alone, he was simply to exhausted to be afraid. He was still standing on his feet through sheer force of will.

He went into a meeting room Ren had appropriated as his own, near the command offices and quarters.

What the Supreme Leader announced him was nothing short of shocking in its unexpectedness.

“I’m promoting you,” Kylo Ren told him with a current of aggressiveness that hadn’t receded from his encounter with what Hux understood as an astral projection of Luke Skywalker.

Still, Hux had too much pride to let himself seemed floored.

“I already have the highest rank,” he replied, his arms straight alongside his body.

“There are other generals.” Kylo Ren said. “I only need one right arm.”

“One does not usually treat his right arm so carelessly,” Hux was quick to answer in a clipped tone. His hair was still ruffled from having been slammed into a wall for warning Ren away from the distraction that Skywalker was obviously meant to be. If Ren thought he was flattering him, he was mistaken. The very fact that he felt free to promote or demote him at all was an insult to all the work he had put in to arrive at his current position.

“ _I_ do,” Ren said, being his usual infuriating self.

“This is a gross waste of resources on your part,” Hux answered, managing to keep an even tone. He had learned along the years to control his physical reactions, as he had been quick to blush in his youth and had paid for it.

“This is why I need you to manage them. The resources.” Ren said, frowning. “I have other preoccupations.”

 _To manage everything you mean_ , Hux thought.

“Snoke called you a rabid cur, someone he could manipulate.” Ren added after a bit, looking through the window into the abyss of space with cold detachment. Why he was sharing that, Hux could only guess. Ren seemed like he liked to toy with people’s emotion and see how they reacted.

“I had no delusions about the Supreme Leader,” Hux said, hardly surprised. Something in his voice made Ren turn toward him again and look at him with more interest than he had shown up to that moment. Hux saw the line of concentration deepen between Ren’s eyes, and he felt something graze his temples, something that he was powerless to stop happening to him. He took a long breath of the familiar artificially renewed air.

He had seen Snoke’s grotesque corpse, and the pieces of red armour, and the body parts that weren’t bleeding, scattered in the room. Ren had said that the girl Rey had murderer the Supreme Leader. But Hux knew this was a lie Ren was telling to make everything simpler. He had seen the praetorial guards fight in the past. The girl, even primed by Skywalker, couldn’t have killed all of them in close combat. Even Ren couldn’t have done it without any injury. They had fought together. They had killed the head of the First Order together.

Most of all, it annoyed him for the disarray it would entail. A leader restrained your freedom of action, but having one also assured that you could act and be obeyed in turn. The soldiers were afraid and distrusting of Ren, who was widely known for his violent and volatile moods. They were too many to be coerced into following him.

“So you know the truth,” said Ren, relaxing his jaw. “You understood.” Evidently, he had followed Hux’s train of thoughts.

“I’m the best military strategist the First Order has, of course I can analyse a battlefield when I see one,” Hux answered between his teeth.

“That confirms you are the one I need,” Ren said, pushing a seat for him to sit on with a flick of his hand. He looked too tall for the standard equipment.

“What do you plan on doing anyway?” Hux asked, his eyes finally boring into Ren’s. “The situation is a mess. We may have destroyed the Republic and _almost_ wiped out the resistance, but we have lost Star Killer, our biggest weapon, as well as our newest dreadnought and the flag ship of our fleet is irremediably damaged. That’s hundred of billions of credits that we didn’t have to spare and we may well have jedi against us in the very near future, something I cannot reasonably ask my men to be prepared to come against.”

A heavy silence hung between them for a few moments. What could have been a day of victory was nothing but a disappointing mess, requiring still more effort to rid the galaxy of criminals. They were both feeling it. Ren’s bottom lip looked heavy, annoyed. Hux braced himself quietly, waiting for the invisible coils of violence that emitted from the brooding man to lash against his body. But the only thing that came from Ren were words half muttered, coming from a place too deep in his chest.

“I can see that you wish you had left me to die on the snow. That you wish you had been quicker to pull the trigger, earlier.”

Hux swallowed, clenching his fists behind his back.

“I don’t,” he denied. “Considering what I have to call Skywalker miracle return, we need a Force user and Snoke is very much dead. If you think that I let my feelings rule over my rationality, you are mistaken.”

With a meditative look, Ren took a sniff. Hux’s blood was swimming in a mix of chemicals, excitants, hormonal suppressants, sleeping aids, staying awake aids, synthetic vitamins, concentrated proteins, kidney detoxers and an overload of natural cortisol. He hadn’t walked in a natural atmosphere for so long that his veins looked purplish underneath his pallid skin, almost bruised underneath his eyes, and his hair was a red getting darker each day spent in the void of space. And yet, miraculously, his mind was still in working order.

“What do you think we should do now?” Ren finally asked.

Hux took the time he needed to compose himself. He finally sat.

“We should take time to regroup,” he began. “Call transport support from the base and save as much equipment as possible of the flag ship. Some of the consoles were one of a kind.”

Ren nodded, so he went on.

“Account for the wounded. Captain Phasma seems to be missing by the way. Establish a new communication plan about the recent events for the planets we control and for our allies. We cannot let this tarnish the respect we have worked so hard to earn. Share the intel you have about Rey with our spies so that they can begin tracking as soon as possible.”

“She was wearing an encrypted beacon.” Ren said.

Hux activated his pad.

“That’s good, that’s useful information.” He wrote a note, sent it. Then, looking at Ren again, remarked “But what will you do with her if you catch her? She could kill you.”

Hux saw Ren’s face begin to twitch in protestation, so he said without waiting for a verbalisation:

“It is a possibility. And it would be the end of us. Or she could turn you. And it would be the end of us still.”

Curiously, this idea seemed to appease Ren. He splayed his fingers on the desk and drummed them lazily on its surface.

“Well, you can act as you see fit on my authority, general. But only set things into motion. After that, I order you to rest. Go to your quarters and lock yourself in. I don’t want you to make a stupid mistake because you haven’t slept in 72 hours.”

 _Even if I hadn’t slept for a hundred hours, I’d still be a better leader than you_ , Hux thought while knocking his heels together before turning to leave the room.

Kylo Ren scoffed.

 

* * *

 

Hux slept, like he was asked to. He would have done it anyway; his error margin became larger with each half hour that passed. Contrary to his habits, he didn’t set an alarm. Things were in a state of disarray and basic protocols had to be followed anyways. These things took time. He trusted the functioning of the First Order hierarchy. He had participated in setting and smoothing it up over the years. True order wouldn’t crumble if its leader wasn’t able to supervise it for a few hours, he told himself to stifle his anxiety. So he slept. Aggressively and fitfully but he slept.

 

* * *

 

Sometimes Ren remembered suddenly.

His father was dead.

He had killed him.

This was still more surprising to him than becoming the leader of a military force potent enough to rule over the galaxy.

It had struck him when he had seen the golden dice that used to dangle in the Falcon on Crait, but he couldn’t seem to really feel the fact for more than a few seconds at a time. Most of the time, his brain refused to involve itself in the realisation. But he had just caught a glimpse of himself in a window and seeing his own face, it hit him. He regretted his helmet. The feeling of realisation was choking him. He was used to bodily pain, but this distress he sometimes endured was far more incapacitating than all the wounds that had ever burnt his skin. He hated it. In those moments, the fight in him was like darkening coals.

The truth was that he had killed his master, and when Rey had turned away from him, any remaining sense of purpose along with it. Being the new head of a behemoth, he was passively waiting for a kind of blurry doom, the idea of which brought him both relief and angst.

 

* * *

 

“I’ve thought about what we should do. While I was sleeping,” Hux reported the following rotation. The supreme leader had allowed him to sit in front of him again.

He had requested a meeting and Ren had surprisingly granted it almost immediately. Hux still had had to go all the way to the conference room that were the closest to Ren’s quarters. He hadn’t changed them to match his new position.

“And what it is that we should do?” Ren asked, leaving his mouth half open. He often did that, Hux had noticed since he ditched his helmet. He looked like he was about to say more, and it gave him a general air of indecision that was unsettling.

“We should rely on intelligence work to finish of the dregs of the Rebellion,” Hux began valiantly. He knew the idea wouldn’t be pleasing to the man who had wished to destroy the resistance with an intensity such that it gave everyone around him a headache. “And focus our main strength in consolidating our position. This is a war of ideology. We need to offer a valid system of values, a system in which economical interest and technological development can thrive.”

“I’d agree.”

This was unexpected. Hux carried on, bracing for a later rebuke.

“Still, we cannot have a centre or a capital planet,” he added. “That would make us weak. Remaining a fleet with no centre is the best strategy at this point.”

“Agreed.” Ren said again, the evenness of his tone starting to grate on Hux’s nerves. But he swallowed any comment.

“And we need to make you the Supreme Leader officially,” he said. “It would have been better not to say Snoke was dead at all, but I fear it is too late for that. The rumour is already circulating, and the absence of hologram addresses in the future will be taken as a confirmation.”

“I don’t want an official ceremony,” Ren said.

There it was. Of course Ren wouldn’t want to do the evident thing. Hux hissed silently. “That may be so, but it is paramount that we…”

“No.”

Hux drew his lips tight together. “Very well, Supreme Leader. If that’s all for now I shall leave you to your endeavours.”

Ren fell back into a slouch. “Implement the rest of what you’ve just described to me. Allow me access to monitor all you do from my account. Notify me in advance of anything out of the ordinary.”

Hux bowed his head, teeth clenched hard and muscles tight, to focus his attention on something other than his deep annoyance. As if anything would pertain to the ordinary in their situation. Ren dismissed him with a flick of his glove and as soon as the door slid close behind him Hux’s mind went into motion to find a way to only allow access to a front of his management strategies to the infuriating child he now had to report to. But first, he had to go see Phasma. She was in the medical bay with third degree burns. He expected she’d be in the biggest bacta tank they had. Stars knew he couldn’t afford to loose an ally.

 

* * *

 

In the few weeks that followed their redirection of politic, while Ren was still adjusting to his new position and Hux to the new order of things, they were civil to each other. The General was even more concentrated on his work than before, if such a thing was possible, and had no time to spare in arguments. He had troops reviews to tend to because he didn’t trust the other captains as much as the still recovering Phasma, officers he had selected himself for their loyalty to train for posts of higher responsibilities, intelligence to analyse and public relation campaigns to improvise, on top of all the various other projects he had been overseeing for months.

Hux knew he _had_ to work with Ren. If they couldn’t find a way to work together, the First Order wouldn’t survive it. If Ren killed him, the whole organisation would collapse on itself with the rise of ambition and corruption. And if he somehow managed to get rid of Ren, the other generals would just as soon destroy him before tearing each other apart.

But it was proving really difficult when Ren was throwing stupid tantrums concerning things so mundane as his physical appearance.

“I really think you should carry the reconstructive procedure to its end,” Hux was explaining for the umpteenth time during the daily debrief they had instituted. He was refraining from gesturing at the scar that cut Ren’s face in half. “It does not send a good message to show that you can be armed.”

“I do not care. I can kill anybody.” Ren spat. This had been is only argument so far.

“I know that,” Hux said, resisting with all his might his desire to pinch the bridge of his nose. “But it’d be a lot smoother for everyone if people didn’t try it every two days. So far we have caught three mercenaries and two heavily armed would-be heroes set on ridding the galaxy of your august presence. One of them has made it as far as freighters’ cantina. Freighter’s cantina! That’s _level 2_ clearance for your information.”

Ren brow furrowed. “I’m sure a lot came for Snoke as well,” he said with a shrug, but his tone wasn’t as assured as it could be.

“People didn’t really believe he existed,” Hux pressed. “They have seen you setting their homeworld in fire.”

“This scar” Ren said with a very deep voice, “is a part of me.”

Hux swallowed any noise of disapproval. “It really doesn’t have to be.”

“Thank you general, that’ll be all,” Ren snapped. The air vibrated around him. Hux got up and left without saying anything more.

That was the kind of nonsense he had to deal with on a daily basis.

 

* * *

 

Thirty five days after becoming the Supreme Leader, Kylo Ren was looking into the void of space that encircled the glowing yellow planet of Erbor, letting it press against his retinas. The planet was the target of an easy conquest aimed at making anyone who may cultivate other ideas remember that the First Order was as ruthless as it was effective. It would also be the testing grounds for a few hundreds graduating Stormtroopers.

He heard someone walking toward him, the heels of their boots resonating in the room. Ren was too much inside his own head to effortlessly reach out with the Force and map his surroundings as he usually did, so he looked toward the sound. He saw a black figure with flamboyant orange hair. Hux was the only one who still dared to be within twenty feet of him these days. He didn’t know if that denoted a brave or suicidal nature on his part.

Hux approached him quietly, arms linked behind his back, but in a leisurely way, as if he was taking a stroll. Ren couldn’t quite believe that Hux looked so composed when his own feelings were nothing but turmoil and madness, chaos without a name.

“Lord Ren,” Hux saluted him.

“General,” Ren answered back, amused for a fleeting moment at the idea that he had disrupted Hux’s steady advance to power and that the man was now exceedingly cautious around him.

A few moments of silence passed between them.

“Do you ever miss it?” Ren asked. “The sunlight.”

Hux didn’t deign to answer. Instead he remarked, with a detached tone:

“I am… _worried_ about you. You won’t do holovids or talk to the crew and agitation is brewing.”

Ren snorted. He put his forehead against the large bay window. It wasn’t even cold. The temperature settings in the Finalizer were regulated with unnerving perfection.

“I would have thought you’d be pleased by my being discreet, instead of worried. Gives you more room to give orders as you want,” he answered, as if it was nothing.

“Well, I can’t deny that this surprise me too,” Hux admitted quietly. “But I am worried that there won’t be anything left to rule over if we don’t do this… perfectly.”

Ren slumped again at that. He half turned his head toward Hux.

“Does it make sense to feel weak because you’re too powerful?” He hated the desperate edge to his voice but couldn’t keep it from making his lip tremble.

Hux, his back as straight as ever, gave him a look and simply said “no.”

This almost made Ren laugh. “You are unbelievable,” he told his general.

Hux took a step toward him, a frank look on his face. Ren knew that the soldiers liked Hux but most of the time he was so rigid that he had difficulties understanding why. “I can’t have you consider such notions.” Hux said earnestly. “We absolutely cannot afford it.”

Ren had not been able to see or speak with Rey since the day he had become Supreme Leader, and he had felt cut off from everything, acting on autopilot and delaying having to think about anything at all. And now Hux was trying to force him to have a part in things that involved hundred of thousands, millions of people. The man was infuriating.

“Your hair.” Ren told him. “It’s very red.”

Surprised, Hux’s hand went to touch it. “I suppose it is.”

“See you later, general.” Ren said in an apparent non sequitur. “I’ll better let myself be seen on Erbor’s surface and let everybody remember that they should be glad to be on my side.”

 

* * *

 

The conquest of Erbor turned out to be an even greater success than Hux had planned. The planet was the economical and cultural leader of its sector and all its satellites spontaneously declared allegiance to the First Order. That represented a lot more resources than Hux had projected he could rely on, and acquired in a much smaller time frame than estimated at that. Everybody was talking fearfully of Kylo Ren, the dark man who could rip aircrafts from the sky. Marbor, the planet that was home to the Academic capital of the cluster, had even asked for a trooper training centre to be opened on their ground as a sign of good faith from both parties.

“Strategy really is the instrument the First Order has to invest in, beyond even armament,” Hux was telling Ren, a glass of amber liquid in his hand. This was the first occasion for celebration in a long time, and the alcohol was putting him in the mood for poetry. “Force should only be used deftly and sparsely for maximum impact. You are like the laser beam of a very carefully constructed equation.”

Ren hummed at that, a bit amused. It was strange to hear Hux babbling in self-satisfaction, but action had relaxed him, and he no longer felt like his skin was too tight. He was savouring even the slight headache strenuous concentration had caused him.

“What you did today was truly remarkable,” Hux continued. “There is no technological response to what you can do. Excellent for our public image. Now, if you could only fix this gash on your face…” he trailed off, lost in his calculations.

Ren’s tone when he answered was way more intense than anything the general could have been expecting. “Why do you hate the scar?” he snapped.

Ren shoulders had tensed minutely as he spoke, and Hux, snatched away from his pleasant buzzing, felt some kind of crushing compulsion to say something that hadn’t even occurred to him before.

“Because its _hers_.”

He wanted to swallow back the words as soon as they hang in the air. But he couldn’t, so he stared furiously into his glass, cursing the impossible man who wouldn’t let him have one small moment of respite. Ren threw one of his shoulders back in amusement at that. He couldn’t deny that he was intrigued. “Are you jealous?” he asked.

“This is ludicrous.” Hux tried to say calmly, his knuckles whitening and his good mood evaporated. When he saw Ren’s mocking smile however, he forwent any pretence at not being annoyed at his intrusion.

“I am not jealous!” He insisted. “I am merely at a loss why you’d let a girl, who is the opposite of what you stand for, matter so much to you.”

All trace of a smile on the usually brooding face vanished in turn. The skin underneath Ren’s eye twitched and his voice rose alongside Hux’s.

“Of course _you_ cannot understand,” he half yelled. “She could see me, through the force. See me whole, as I am.”

Hux hunched forward over the table, swallowing nervously. He was afraid, but he had learned to embrace the feeling. If he couldn’t control it, so be it. He wouldn’t refrain from acting because of it. That much was in his power.

“I can see you too,” he tried.

The surprise cut Ren’s anger clean. He laughed, a rusted sound with a meanness to it that was almost seductive.

“No, you can’t. Not like that.”

A vein bulged on Hux’s brow. He hated being told he couldn’t do things. He hated that Ren always ruined things by being his impossible self. He took a swallow before saying “I thought everything was linked to the Force.”

“That’s true,” Kylo Ren answered, leaning back so that his face was half covered in darkness. His voice was back to his usual deepness.

“Then show me!” Hux demanded, foregoing any pretence to be composed so annoyed he was by such volatility.

Ren moved again, this time put his forearms on his tights. “First of all, admit it.”

“Admit what?”

“That you are jealous.”

“Ren, this is stupid, I…”

“It’s not stupid. I’ll see your innermost thoughts if we do this. If you’re not ready for so simple an admission, then I do not think you are ready to experience such a forceful communication. So admit that you are jealous.” Ren asked again.

Hux’s cheeks were streaked by blood. “This is humiliating. You are asking me to admit to something shameful about myself, to something that would weaken me, and yet you give nothing in exchange. This is nothing like what you seeing me and me seeing you would be like.”

Ren’s anger ignited again, like a living thing. “If you do not trust me and if you think admitting to this in particular is shameful, then you are not worthy to see me.”

He rose to leave, making the glasses clink on the table, and Hux, fearful to miss a rare opportunity to get into Ren’s head to protect what didn’t amount to more than a useless sense of modesty, almost cried out “I _am_ jealous.”

Ren’s eyes searched his face. “Why?”

Veins gorging themselves at his temples, Hux was obviously very mad to have to say any of this. “I’m jealous that I’m not… special,” he admitted. “This girl, she is no one, from nowhere, and she can do the things she does. Amazing things I could never hope to achieve. She’s your equal.” The admission tasted even bitter than he had anticipated. His pale eyes, glazed with a shade of blame, rose to meet Ren’s.

“You seek her out, you want her as your companion,” he continued with a resentment that was hard to hide. “I have sacrificed my life to the work we both believe in, I have endured hardship and humiliations beyond what would be considered tolerable to have the position I have today, and when you talk to me you don’t talk to me as an ally.”

Ren first reaction would have been to laugh outright in Hux’s face. But he didn’t. Was the idea of the two of them working together so ridiculous? Hux seemed to want it far more than he would have imagined.

Ren looked away. He didn’t like inquisitive eyes. “Snoke understood the dark side but never opened the slightest connection between us; I had a bond with Rey, but she doesn’t understand the first thing about the true freedom of the dark.”

Hux eyebrows knitted themselves together. “I would…”

“Yes, you understand darkness, and you want a connection. All you lack is the capacity.” Ren answered dismissingly.

Hux face shut down. “I am not, in anyway, lacking,” he declared with a furious calm. He wouldn’t let himself be insulted after the openness and frankness he had just offered. “I’ll let you think on it,” he declared before knocking the rest of his glass down his throat.

He’d change his mind by further monitoring the incorporation of Erbor to First Order territories. One could always rely on work.

* * *

 

Ren thought he would forget about this flight of fancy from his austere general, but the idea of a true alliance between them stayed with him and he found himself to be considering it several times during the next rotations. Force contact with someone that wasn’t sensitive was at best an interrogation technique, at worse psychological torture. But Hux was used to duress, if only from his training.

Using Snoke’s access, Ren looked up Hux’s file. The general had withstood unbearable amounts of stress in times of crisis. He had been promoted at an alarming speed, the people working with him finding themselves promoted with him or disappearing in the dark corners of the First Order. He was one of the most hated men in the galaxy and one of the best received when he was planet side. Ren wondered how, living such an existence, Hux had any space left for an internal life.

 

***

 

With a muted sound the door slid open, and then shut. Hux’s black figure drew the chair that had become his own with time. They were now orbiting Allotar, a planet that had been theirs for a long time and where soldiers were taking a few days leave in rotations. Hux had chosen this planet because a tiny flight of rebels had been sighted near it a few rotations ago.

“Supreme leader,” Hux started the order of the day with a sneer of distaste, “since we have a little time, I have a project to bring to your attention.”

“What is it, Hux?” Kylo asked, annoyed these distasteful meetings were by now an unavoidable interruption in his day. It seemed that Hux had somehow pinpointed the exact moment he wanted to talk the less to schedule them. Currently, there was a mess of circuits spread before Ren on his desk, and his attention was taken away from the tiny screwdriver he was using to open a small black box. He hadn’t wanted to go in one of the workshops and disturb the mechanical technicians. Mostly because the general would have lectured him.

“The Stormtrooper housing project. I already mentioned it to you,” Hux answered.

Ren put his tools back on the table. Hux’s reports were usually so exhaustive that bits of information often got lost. This was the case with this damned housing project. But Hux was carrying on.

“Our architects have designed three variations of the same unit: the simplest one is for troopers on leave, we have one for families as we have allowed the marriage quota to be raised to 12% this year, and the last one is for discharged veterans. For the name of the complex, the development team was thinking of Storm Harbour.”

Ren scoffed at that. “That’s stupid.”

“Is that all you have to contribute?” Hux asked tiredly. “I come with the most summarized of summaries for a project it took our PR, accounting and engineering teams months and months to put together, and that’s your answer?”

Ren had the good grace to look the slightest bit chastised. 

“Approve the project if you think it’s sound. I trust your judgement. And you should name the sector where the most decorated veterans will live _Hux’s close_.”

Hux reddened a bit at that.

“There is no need to make a fool of me.”

“I am not. This was your idea, wasn’t it? I recognise the unique mix of propaganda and practicality.”

Hux nodded, still unsure if Ren was toying with him or not.

“So it should bear your name.”

A heavy silence descended upon them.

“I have also thought about how we should make your new status official,” Hux finally added with some degree of reluctance.

 _Ah, so that’s what he really wanted to talk about_. Ren stood up from his chair, and when Hux started to do the same, with his extended hand he indicated that his general should remain seated. He went up around his desk and sat back on the edge of it, hovering over Hux, their faces much closer now.

“Speak,” he said, his eyes searching.

“Well, I thought of doing some kind of enthronisation. But it would send the wrong message. You are the leader. You don’t need anybody to confirm your authority. You have it, no one is qualified to confirm or infirm the fact.”

Ren smiled, pleased. Hux sat up a little straighter at the approval.

“So it would be better to see you officiate in this role right away. Your first official ceremony as Supreme Leader…” Hux stalled a bit, gathering courage for what was next.

“Go on,” Ren told him with the ghost of a smile. Hux took a few more seconds to steady his heart before explaining himself. Ren could feel the fear breaking at the surface of his skin, laced with resolve and absolute confidence in his idea.

“You said you wanted to promote me. The army already knows and obeys me. This wouldn’t be a disruptive event, and the fact that I accept things from you would give anyone else a clue how to follow your decisions. I think this should be your first official act.”

“Let me formulate this clearly,” Ren said, walking around the room, away from the light. That way his body was veiled in shadows. “You think that I should enthrone myself by enthroning you.”

The air felt denser inside the cabin and the usual hum of the machinery seemed to fall away. Hux sounded out of breath when he answered “Yes.”

“That is… an interesting idea, general.” Ren said slowly. “I’ll think about it.”

 


	2. The Executioner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Supreme Leader Kylo Ren and General Hux learn to work together so that the First Order expansion may thrive. If they have to be a little more than coworkers to make it work, so be it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> See notes at the end for warnings that may spoil the plot!

Hux waited but nothing seemed to come of it. He saw Ren everyday, but every meeting was over in less than five minutes. It had taken him a great deal of nerves, and pills to steady them, to suggest his brilliant idea to Ren. He had not used this method of suggestion with Snoke, because the supreme leader always seemed to know what he was thinking before he had even opened his mouth, and dismissed it even quicker. He instead manoeuvred in the grey area as much as possible and was creative in the interpretation of his orders. Ren, in spite of his new position conquered by blood, didn’t seem to want to control anything. He let Hux do his job most of the time, only requiring the monitoring of his actions at the most infuriating moments. But he was bad at acknowledging cleverness in others.

 

* * *

 

Strangely enough, Hux ended up receiving a notification about ten days later on his pad. Supreme Leader Kylo Ren was requesting that he came to his personal quarters rather than in the usual meeting room for their debrief.

In that time, Hux had approved revision in the schematic of the star destroyers’ propulsion system that would save up on energy, had discreetly censored an opera criticising First Oder expansion politics through veiled imagery and had personally attended the graduation ceremony of a new class of Flight Officers. His discourse for the occasion had been widely quoted and dissected as a reflection of the new leadership directions. So he wasn’t sure exactly what it was Ren wanted to discuss.

He entered in his quarters not letting himself worry. It smelled strange inside, like something had been burned by fire.

“You wanted to see me supreme Leader?”

Ren came out from his bedroom, quiet as a shadow.

“Yes,” he said, designing the only armchair of the room. “I have thought about your idea.”

“Oh. Good,” Hux said. He removed his hat and sat, resting it on his knees. He then seemed to change his mind and discarded it on a nearby console. After that he put an ankle over his knee.

Ren waited until he was settled. “I don’t know if it’s a desperate attempt on your part to retain power but you should know I am not really interested in ruling over others. I became Supreme Leader because I wanted no one to have any authority over me. Do you understand?”

“I…” Hux began uncertainly. “Yes.”

Ren’s expression didn’t change. He went on. “You are useful to me. You are exemplary at what you do. I have no desire to take your authority away from you.”

“Thank you Supreme…”

“But if you are ever plotting against me…” Ren closed his fist, teeth gleaming in his open mouth.

Hux felt the Force coil around his throat.

“I am not,” he said on an exhale, trying to find space to survive in the vice.

Hux had made peace with the idea that Ren wasn’t a reasonable man. He knew that when you cannot change the facts, you had to work around them.

“You can… look inside me,” he said. “If you have trouble believing me.”

With an annoyed shrug, Ren let go of the pressure entirely.

“I don’t know why you are so fixated on this idea,” he said, as if Hux was the one being unreasonable. Hux tried not to wince at the contempt in his voice. Ren always sounded so arrogant and vain when he was talking about the Force.

“You have no idea what you are offering,” Ren continued haughtily. “It’s meaningless to me. I’d much rather you offered something you intimately know the price of.”

“I don’t know what more you could want from me,” Hux said, eyebrows knitted together. He wanted to touch his throat, but he kept his hands still and his back ramrod straight.

“Strip.”

“Excuse me?” Hux spat, getting up from his chair in a brusque movement. There was a limit to what he could pretend hadn’t happened.

Ren looked angry. “If you think letting yourself be scrutinized with the Force is any less of a violation, you are sorely mistaken.”

Hux stayed unmoving for a few seconds, mouth still half opened from surprise and indignation. Then he took off his gloves, tugging on the index and the major once before sliding the leather off his hand in one smooth pull.

Ren’s eyes bore into his. He’d have thought Hux would have stormed off and left him alone by now. But no, the infuriating general just wouldn’t capitulate.

Hux naked hands went to his collar and prayed it open seamlessly. Ren was looking with his upper lip slightly pursed. Hux divested himself of his dress jacket and went to rest it on the back of the chair, but was startled as it flew to Ren’s hand. Hux was tall but he was a slight man with narrow hips and bony shoulders. With each deep inhalation, his skin went to hug his ribs.

“You do not take enough nourishment in.” Ren said, bringing the cloth to his nose. He breathed in the smell of Hux on it.

“Carry on,” he told Hux, who was waiting dumbfounded in his trousers.

Hux unbuttoned his fly with clumsier hands. Thumbs hooked into his waistband, he seemed to change his mind and went to tug at his boots instead. One of them caught at his heel and he felt his ears burn when he heard a noise of amusement rumble in Ren’s throat.

He stood straight again and let the pants of the uniform slide against his tights.

“The breeches, too.” came the laconic order. Hux could feel the dormant rage behind it. Cursing himself for insisting too much on getting closer to this half mad man, he got rid of the last piece of cloth covering his modesty.

Ren’s eyes went to his visible hipbones, his bright pubic hair, his shrivelled up testicles and tiny penis. Hux heart was beating madly. He tried to ground his naked feet on the floor. This seemed unreal. All the familiar first order furniture suddenly looked odd and cruel.

“How long have you been taking hormonal suppressants?” Ren asked him, his gaze affixed to his genitals.

“Since I turned 18. The legal human age for them.”

Ren nodded. Almost all unmarried officers followed the practice.

“Would you let me touch you?”

Hux could feel his pulse in his throat now.

“If you’d like,” he said, trying to smother the wild fear that had woken in his eye.

Ren took a step forward. He pulled off his right glove as well, and drew his arm forward. His fingers touched Hux’s shoulder, and everywhere goose bumps broke on his skin. He slid his thumb gently on the white and cool skin, following the ridge of the bone, and spread his whole end at the base of Hux’s throat, gently.

“Can I touch you there?” Ren asked, looking pointedly at Hux’s small penis.

“Yes.” Hux allowed, with tears pooling against his cornea.

Ren dragged his hand down, with a slowness that made Hux ache in anticipation. One of Ren’s fingers caught in his navel, and his breath hitched. Ren’s eyes seemed to ask the question one last time. Hux bit his lip and gave a terse nod. Ren’s nails scratched against the red pubic hairs and finally his huge hand closed on Hux’s genitals, swallowing everything from view.

Just as Hux was about to muffle a cry, he felt it plunge everywhere inside him. It felt dark, and cruel, brave, chaotic, passionate, murderous, idealistic, detached, tortured, resilient, clever, impulsive, and most off all, torn apart by all of this.

_Is that what you wanted?_

It was too much to see clearly. To see at all. But Hux felt with everything that formed his being. And at the same time he was burned by a light that exposed everything of him, a dark light that had eyes, terribly inquisitive eyes. He tried to let it happen to him, to welcome the intrusion as best as he could, letting his orbits, the back of his skull, his eardrums, even his urethra be penetrated by those eyes that exposed so much of him that it blinded him to himself. Dazzled, he sought a point to cling on to and woke grasping Ren’s arms with white knuckles, hyperventilating.

“Calm down, you’re all right, it’s over,” Ren was saying to him, his hands clasping Hux’s forearms back.

“I…I…” Hux tried to say, but his tongue wasn’t obeying him and he swallowed too much because something was stuck in his throat. He was on his knees on the floor, utterly naked, all his weight on Ren.

“You did well,” Ren told him. “Much better than I expected. You have to collect yourself a bit now.”

“But…” Hux tried weakly.

“I have your pad, we won’t miss any emergency do not worry. Here, rest a few minutes.”

Ren all but dragged him to his bed. The covers felt coarse against Hux’s naked skin. Ren didn’t try to cover him up. He left him to lie there and Hux didn’t have enough left in him to see what he did after that.

 

* * *

 

When he awoke, Hux felt strangely calm considering the situation. He hadn’t slept deeply. He knew where he was the whole time and scenarios played into his mind of why he had to urgently get up and leave, but his limbs were too heavy to move. Even when he started to feel a bit chilly he hadn’t found the energy to pull the cover over his shoulders. In a way, he felt imprisoned in his own body, but at the same time he had never felt so present inside his muscles and his organs. It was unsettling.

When he was finally strong enough to open his eyes, the ceiling was spotless. He sat up and looked at the rolls his skin made on his stomach.

“Hux,” a voice called him. “Ammunition control needs to speak with you.”

Things seem to rush back into his head all at once and he threw his legs over the bed. Ren, slouched on a chair and fidgeting with odd pieces of wood, seemed to perceive the elevation of his heartbeat.

“You have plenty of time, I scheduled it in 74 minutes,” he said. “In the meeting room closest to my quarters.”

“Where is my uniform?” Hux asked tensely, forbidding himself to try and cover the worse of his nudity.

“On my desk.”

Hux looked toward the desk, saw the dark cloth folded on it, looked at Ren, hesitated for a few seconds.

“Would you please give it to me?”

Ren got up slowly, went toward his desk in one stride and grabbed the bundle into one fist.

“You can order a new one if you want it freshly pressed,” he remarked.

“Yes, that’d be better,” Hux agreed nervously but maintaining his countenance. “I’ll put on the breeches and sock while I wait for it,” he added.

Ren gave him the pieces of clothing he asked for, and watched him put his breeches on. Hux sat back on the bed to slide the socks on. When he folded his hands in his lap and seemed to do nothing more, Ren lit the pad back on and ordered a fresh uniform for him.

“It’ll be here in six minutes,” he said. “Droid delivered.”

“Thank you,” Hux replied.

A strange silence fell between them. Hux brain was calculating from very far away.

“Was it what you expected?” Ren asked brusquely, turning to face him.

“Yes.”

Ren looked surprised. “And no,” Hux added, caressing his hands together. “I did _feel_ you more than I _saw_ you.”

Ren shrugged with some scorn. “It’s the Force, not the Sight.”

“How does it work? Do you connect with my nervous system?”

“Do not try to rationalise and belittle what you’ve just experienced.”

“What we’ve both experienced,” Hux corrected with some heat. “I did _feel_ you.”

He looked at Ren’s dark form with a wonder he was experiencing for the first time.

“Do you still want to subjugate me?” Ren asked.

“I want to help you. This is too much. I almost drown in it. I can only imagine what you must feel…”

“Yes.” Ren said, advancing on him with something akin to fervour in his eyes. He looked like a menacing wave to Hux. “Yes,” Hux repeated, feeling lost and in control at the same time.

The door chimed. It was Hux’s uniform.

* * *

 

After that, Hux thought about it often. He thought about it all the time.

He had known Kylo Ren was powerful. He had seen it. But he thought the power belonged to him, that it was his to do as he pleased with it. He had thought of it as a weapon. He hadn’t known Ren was trying to swim in it not to get submerged and lost in it. His mind was just like cesium: rare, beautiful, and highly unstable.

Hux took action.

 

* * *

 

Ren entered Hux’s quarters in a billowing of black fury. He had not bothered to announce himself and had bypassed the safety protocol of the door. Hux lifted an eyebrow as he marched on him, not putting his pad down for all the commotion of this entrance. It wouldn’t do to appear afraid in his own room.

“Who gave you the right?” Ren asked, outraged. “I told you I didn’t want a ceremony! And I never agreed to your twisted little enthronement plan!”

“I don’t need to ask permission for anything aboard my ship”, Hux answered in a calm tone, but a vein was bulging on his brow.

A lone chair and Hux’s desk began to rattle around Ren, the artificial atmosphere of the room getting thick and somehow denser.

“Your ship? Don’t get too comfortable, you egoma…” Ren began, but Hux cut him right away by standing up.

“It won’t kill you,” he said with a hard voice. “You have survived both the Star Killer and the Skywalker resurrection disasters. We both have. And you told me yourself you were promoting me. You can understand that it needs to be official to mean something.”

That seemed to calm Ren, who didn’t try to answer something back. He was only looking at Hux, breathing more deeply than usual.

“I don’t want to do it,” he repeated feebly.

Hux walked towards Ren. When he was in front of him, looking unafraid even if his heart was beating hard, he put a hand on his forearm, as if to further placate him.

“Why do you have to be so terrible all the time?” he asked in a voice that was surprisingly soft.

“I…” Ren began, casting down his eyes to look at Hux’s hand on his sleeve. Wasn’t Hux afraid to touch him now? He had choked him only a few days ago. Hux was like a cockroach. His will power wouldn’t be stifled, against all odds.

Ren let go of something inside of him and slumped, no longer maintaining his core tight and his shoulders straight. His entire attitude seemed to collapse underneath Hux’s hand. His breath hitched, and tears began to fill his eyes, to prickle his nose. He tried to look Hux in the eyes, and Hux nodded, just as if he knew all that was going inside Ren’s tortured mind, just as if he was giving him permission to finally break down.

“I don’t even feel guilty,” he said. “I don’t.” He repeated, bewildered.

There was no need for him to explain. He knew that Hux knew he was talking about his father. Hux had felt all he felt, even if just for a fleeting moment. Hux hummed in discreet sympathy.

“I don’t feel anything,” Ren muttered.

“I doubt that’s true. I’d rather say you feel too much,” Hux objected, his voice levelled.

Ren took a shaky breath and stood straight again, his eyes searching for Hux’s.

“I feel the deep, euphoric elation of the darkness that is unsettling my whole body,” he managed to say. “And I feel like a patricide that has tried to cut all human feeling from himself and failed miserably. My brain won’t to process any of it, because I won’t let it.”

Hux free hand went to rest on Ren’s other forearm. There was a bridge between them now. “I can help you get past this,” Hux told him breathlessly. “I can help you become one again.”

Ren tried to look inside him. “How? How could you? You’re just a man.”

Hux stayed silent for three breaths. Then he said “Become mine.”

Ren’s heartbeat instantly skyrocketed. He couldn’t quite believe that Hux had just dared to ask him that. And still, right in front of him, the general was talking, voice vibrant with determination.

“Make my will yours, my purpose yours. Forget the pain of being yourself through serving me.”

Hux spoke with a quiet passion that his features didn’t betray. His hands squeezed Ren’s elbows, and his touch conveyed absolute certitude. Ren remained speechless for a few moments, his shoulders slumped, his chin down.

“How would that be different from having Snoke as a master?” he finally asked, doubtful but still asking.

“It will be nothing like having Snoke as a master.” Hux declared with certitude. “Snoke wouldn’t touch you, or be near you, or let you feel his feelings and think his thoughts. I will.”

Ren could feel Hux absolute confidence in Ren’s strength, the adamant conviction of his ambition, his carefully constructed plans, all unguarded.

“You can seek solace in me,” Hux said with conviction, bending a little so that he could see Ren’s face. “You won’t have to be left alone facing your destiny. In fact, you won’t have to have a destiny at all. You can renounce it for mine.”

Ren swallowed hard, not breaking eye contact. “You know I could kill you, but you still think you are better than me.”

“That’s because I am. The greatest power is the one you have over yourself.”

There was something a bit mad in Hux’s pale eyes. Hux let silence fall around them for a moment before adding, getting even closer to Ren’s face, as if daring him to look inside his head again, forever, at the truth of his thoughts:

“ You _know_ I can’t force you to do anything. Of the two of us, you have the strength. You are all of it. All I offer is the comfort to have someone to choose to submit to. You need it. Desperately. I can feel it.”

Ren blinked. Even following Snoke hadn’t seemed as strange as this. And yet, he couldn’t deny that a deep relief had unburdened his chest at the idea. His anger was forgotten, replaced by a deep yearning for something, anything. Somewhere to anchor himself before his mind collapsed on itself in denied anxiety.

But he had killed, again and again, for his freedom. “I don’t want to submit, and I don’t want to follow.”

“I don’t want to submit, and I don’t want to follow either,” Hux replied. “But I’ve had to in my life. No matter the situation, I act with as much control as possible. Sometimes you need crash barriers to do that.”

“And you want to be my crash barrier by deciding what it is the First Order should do. Is that it?”

“Yes,” Hux whispered urgently, searching Ren’s face to make sure his point was clear. “But you know I’m not anything like you. I can’t force you. You know it. I’m nothing. You won’t be forced to obey me. If you don’t like what I say, you can bear it or you can just kill me and be free.”

Ren swallowed, but did not push Hux away from him. His hands were gripped like vices around the dark cloth of his tunic. “How do you know I’ll obey any of what you say?” he asked, his voice still defiant.

“Because,” Hux tried to formulate his offer yet another way, “you’ll learn to obey yourself that way.”

Ren took Hux’s hands away from his arm. Hux’s heart started to beat wildly and everything in him was yelling at him to run away. A hot cloud of fear went to his head and started to make the room around him spun. But Ren only enclosed Hux’s hands inside his own. “I will make you my Imperator.” The word resonated infinitely in the room. It had been much dreamt of but never once uttered in the small space. Hux felt something ease itself in at the forefront of his brain, but he didn’t know if it was pure exultation or Ren.

“Just…give me a little more time.” Ren added, eyes closing.

 

 

* * *

 

Patience was one of Hux’s great virtues. So he waited, without so much as mentioning his becoming Imperator to Ren. This was a delightful torture, to think so much of it but never allowing himself to speak of it.

But from that point on, the two men began to spend more time together. Velvet smooth, Ren forced a lot of minds to tell Hux which of his subalterns he could truly trust and rely on. Hux arranged slots in the hyper gravity room schedule for Ren to train in challenging conditions. Together they interrogated and bought smugglers, blasted mining sites that wouldn’t sell to them and presented the miners as slaved saved by the First Order, executed the King of a Moon who had said Luke Skywalker was a god, analysed intelligence to thwart rebels attacks on their shipments and new settlements, and generally lead the army to the conquest of the galaxy.

 _You make life bearable_. That’s what Hux could read in Ren’s eyes. But he couldn’t see any true sense of purpose yet.

 

* * *

Hux was furious. The ship’s censors had picked up the vital signature of Poe Dameron, resistance captain, orbiting Kloravia. Apparently, the rebels intended to get in the way of the negotiations. Their incessant and suicidal nagging had grown insufferable over the last few months.

The kloravian’s rotation cycle around their system’s sun was marked by rituals linked to war: the opening of the combat season, the three days truce of the Golden Moons, the remembrance day of the Great Burial, and so forth. Their civilisation was one that prized military power.

Hux had officially commanded the cadet who had put together the analytical file about Kloravia; he had called for as many of these files as possible in the context of a wide alliance scheme designed to counterbalance resistance recruitments. Kloravia was a textbook example of the kind of planet he was looking for. Why the rebels felt like they had to meddle in a situation where they obviously wouldn’t have any weight was obscure at best.

“They may be trying to recruit more aggressive soldiers to strengthen their ranks,” Ren suggested. They were both monitoring the dispatching of shuttles from the command bridge.

“I doubt the Kloravians would be considered a good choice by these democrat weaklings,” Hux answered. “They usually destroy everything in their wake, and take slaves. They do not have many values in common.”

Ren grunted in response.

“I intend to make an elite invasion legion out of them,” Hux added in a lower voice, for Ren’s benefit alone. “With a special ranking system adapted from their cast system. Useful when we want surface installations preserved.”

“I thought they destroyed everything,” Ren remarked, his voice low as well. He wouldn’t have followed the cue a month back.

Hux half turned toward him, the ghost of a smirk on his lips. “They are organic beings. Still more easily constrained than a bomb blast.”

“Sir,” Mitaka interrupted them, “there are three other X-wings with the Dameron individual.”

Hux said nothing. Ren’s eyes closed for a few seconds and when he opened them again, gave a terse nod. Rey wasn’t among the party.

“Should we engage pursuit?” Mitaka enquired tensely.

“No. Monitor them closely and report the whole feed to me while Lord Ren and I are planet side.”

The silence on the bridge was tense, as quite a few of the officers had seen what had happened to general Hux when he had last dared to express his will too forcefully in front of Kylo Ren. But this time the dark figure only nodded. Arms linked behind his back, a smile ill concealed, Hux looked through the huge display window, toward the rust coloured planet.

* * *

 

The grand Klovar received them in military dress at the fortress of Bodar. Inside it, was a wooden palace that got burned and reconstructed every year, the war chamberlain told them. Medicinal plants that made everyone high were put in the fire and sacrifices were roasted in it for everyone to share. It was a great honour to be received there. 

Hux had brought Captain Phasma and two detachments of Stormtroopers with them to honour his hosts as well. But as soon as the official salutation were out of the way, he informed the grant Klovar of the unwanted presence of pestering rebels and offered him to demonstrate First Order light aircraft technical prowess by shooting them down from the sky, for his entertainment and information. The idea was approved on the spot and Ren turned heels and went with menacing strides to his TIE-Fighter.

With two pilots covering him, Ren started the chase. He first had to force Dameron inside the atmosphere, which took a while. While the officials, their belts heavy with weapon, were commenting the show animatedly, Hux discreetly checked the screen of his watch. Mitaka was informing him that Dameron was likely here because sources were reporting that a small portion of the Kloravian population viewed an alliance with the First Order as an annexation and was willing to hear what the Resistance had to say.

Hux attention was called away from typing back his orders to Mitaka. The Kloravian were loudly admiring Ren’s deftness. He moved, looped, turned and killed. Once he had forced the Resistance pilots down, one shot was all it took him to set aflame three of the X-wings. Dameron was an excellent pilot, but he was no match for a Force user. Ren managed to shot down Dameron’s craft, for Phasma to collect on the ground.

Armor shining like a mirror, Phasma pushed Dameron toward Ren when he exited his cockpit.

The grand Klovar grunted in approval. “We respect leaders that go to combat with the flesh of their own bodies.”

Hux sneered at him. “Kylo Ren is our Supreme Leader.”

* * *

With handcuffs hindering his movements, and Ren towering menacingly behind him, Poe Dameron was brought to Hux. Ren gave him one shove and he fell to his knees.

“General Hugs,” Dameron mock saluted him, his swagger not lost to fear yet. The fool was no doubt hoping to provoke a revolution on the spot.

“This is Imperator Hux you are kneeling at the feet off,” Ren’s gravel voice corrected him. “The commander of all the First Order armies.”

“I didn’t know that you got a consolation prize,” Dameron mocked with a dazzling smile.

“Who is this?” asked the grand Klovar, pointing his chin at the small man.

“That,” Hux answered haughtily, “is what’s left of our enemies.”

The Grand Klovar snickered at that. He was a man who could appreciate a good blow. Kylo Ren passed a hand through his hair and went to stand at Hux’s shoulder.

“Yes, we are all that’s left, rebel scum, and yet we will be enough to end you,” Dameron declared.

“Really?” Hux asked, with obvious disinterest. His hand started to hitch for a good slap.

Dameron, with his silver quick reflexes, seemed to anticipate this and spat at him.

The saliva left his mouth in a powerful arc, headed for Hux’s dark uniform. Swiftly, Ren extended an arm and it reversed its course. The spit trembled mid-air and went back where it came from, Dameron’s jaw being pried open with a great and invisible violence. Cold and foaming, it went back into his mouth and down his throat. Dameron started to choke on his own spittle. His face went red, the veins in his neck bulging as tiny droplets of the saliva entered his lungs. A horrible cough tried to fight against the intrusion, but it buckled under the pressure of the Force and turned back inside. Tears were running from his eyes as he was desperately gasping. Fascinated, Hux saw them running much too fast toward the open mouth gaping for breath. Next to him, Ren was holding Poe Dameron’s whole trembling frame from his outstretched arm, compelling his muscles against his body’s will to survive to press and press inside. He was feeling unadulterated pleasure at doing so for the first time in his life. Maybe because he had fed on Hux’s white hot anger.

“Anyone who dares to show disrespect to our Imperator will drown in it,” he said, dropping the body to the ground.

“Finish him,” Hux said. “He won’t talk.” He was also hoping that this demonstration would stifle among the natives any desire to consider the Resistance’s proposals.

Under the rapt attention of the Klorovians, Kylo Ren closed his fist, and the movement was accompanied by a sickening crunching of bones.

After that, the conclusion of the alliance was a brilliant success.

 

* * *

“I have something for you,” Hux told Ren back on their ship, a few days later.

They were going through a nebula and nothing much was happening. Ren had been training handstand walking for an hour but was now pacing the bridge with obvious boredom.

“A piece of your mind?” He asked Hux, glad for the diversion. Not everyday could be war and conquest.

“You know you can have that at leisure,” Hux told him with tight lips. “No, it’s an object.”

When later Ren came to Hux’s quarters, a small box was waiting on his desk.

“This is for you,” Hux said. “For what you did for me. With me rather.”

Intrigued, Ren sat at the desk and opened it. Inside the box was a plain ring of white gold, simply adorned with shards off black tourmalines mounted in the shape of a star map. The gems reminded Hux of Ren’s scattered moles.

“What is it?” Ren asked, taking it between his fingers.

“The system where Arkanis is,” Hux explained, forcing himself to look Ren in the eye. “I want to give you this ring in sign of my faith in you. I hated it because it was my father’s, and now I will love it because it is yours.”

Ren felt his heart race in his chest. He couldn’t quite believe his ears. He hadn’t expected Hux to talk to him in such sentimental terms. But he had killed for him so maybe that wasn’t so surprising.

“Let the past die,” he said, putting the ring on his finger. Hux, with his dark smile, seemed to share the sentiment.

 

* * *

What Hux had been silently and arduously waiting for happened while they were taking over the construction of a neutrinos research facility. Some local protesters opposing the annexation had derailed their plans a bit by turning into a mob. Notwithstanding, that gave a good exercise to the hundred Stromtroopers that were planet side with them.

Ren had suggested they take their meal together since it looked like they’d be delayed from returning aboard the Finalizer. Ren got some local food from the pop-up cantina manned for First Order personal, but as they went to a secluded area, Hux was only carrying water with him.

He got regular rations out of his pocket when they were seated. To Ren inquisitive look, he replied that he only ever ate technical food.

“I had guessed.” Ren said, biting in some flesh. “Your teeth haven’t been blunted much.”

“Ah, yes.” Hux gave Ren a sharp smile.

“For how long have you been eating that way?”

“Oh, since I joined the Academy on Arkanis. I almost do not remember the taste of real food.”

“I suppose you don’t shower with water either,” Ren said.

“A good leader shouldn’t soften himself with the niceties he asks his men to abstain from,” Hux answered graciously. Ren scoffed.

“I can’t imagine you gorging yourself on roasts and sweets either,” Hux countered

“No,” Ren said, amused. “I’ve been fasting, meditating, abstaining and climbing mountains bare footed for a long time. But I don’t expect to abide by this silliness anymore.”

“No, you don’t need to.” Hux smiled again, pouring a spoon of water on a vitamin cube. With a muted noise, it grew into a kind of spongy paste. They grew silent for a while.

“We should do it on Arkanis.”

Mouth still stuffed, Huw drew his eyebrows together at Ren.

“The ceremony. It’s your homeworld, isn’t it?”

“It is,” Hux said, grateful to have his mouth full so that his features couldn’t be distorted too much by pleasure.

“You must have a home there,” Ren explained, amused. “People who’d be proud to watch.”

Hux swallowed and the smirk deepened around his mouth. “Not really. But there are people there I’d love to see choke on envy.”

“It’s settled then.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A member of the Resistance dies in this chapter. Sorry.


	3. The Imperator

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Imperator, noun: title given to victorious generals; commender of the fighting army

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter earns this story its Mature rating. Enjoy!

Seventeen days later, the minimal time required to inform all the superior officers of the First Order as well as all the Allies Leaders that their presence was requested on Arkanis, the Imperator to be led Supreme Leader Ren to his family house. Only droids accompanied them, and a handful of officers that were the closest to General Hux.

The Finalizer’s sensors were locked on them. They were set to spend only two nights on Arkanis.

The capital was full to the brim with First Order personal, although Hux had ordered that all the Generals and Admirals invited to his enthronement leave their Star Destroyers to their ungoing mission. It would have been a strategic ruin to assemble the whole fleet in the orbit of a single planet.

Hux’s family house was not a place that brought back fond memories. It didn’t affect him when his men pushed the furniture and his mother’s num-paintings away to install monitor screens and long-range communication stations in the reception rooms. He withdrew to the upper floor with no instruction to treat anything with care, taking Kylo Ren with him.

 

* * *

 

“It is so strange, seeing you here,” Hux said “In a place and a time when I didn’t even suspect your existence.” He was showing Ren Brendol’s bedroom, the room he intended to give him for the two nights they would spend on Arkanis.

“It’s strange being in your home,” Ren replied in a low voice, touching some object on the mantle of the fireplace. It was an antique Brendol had been fond off because it pertained to the stylish lifestyle that had once been that of the Empire. “Strange being on your side. But strange doesn’t mean it is not right.”

“I know,” Hux said, sitting on the edge of the bed. He looked outside. The sky was a dull grey and the horizon unclear from the curtain off rain that was always falling.

“Are you sure about doing this outside tomorrow?” he asked Ren. “We have large indoor facilities available here, seing as the rain always makes everything so unpractical.”

Ren sat next to him. He was wearing Brendol’s ring. His ring now. “Trust me,” he told Hux, “as I am trusting you with all of this.”

Hux looked unsure. “I trust you,” he said, taking the decision of making it true.

Ren patted his tight in approval. “Tomorrow morning, I’ll also give you your new uniform.”

Hux thought about the pristine custom made white jacket he had brought with him. “I’ll wear it,” he said.

* * *

 

Ren had said he had prepared a new uniform but the clothes Hux saw from the corridor the next morning, that were quietly waiting on the bed, looked much like the ones he was wearing at that very moment. Still, he said nothing as he followed Ren farther into the room.

“I didn’t think white would suit you,” Ren explained. “Suit the colour of your hair.”

“I would accommodate myself to any colour,” Hux answered, waiting a bit before adding, feeling brave, “You like the colour of my hair, don’t you?”

“I do,” Ren said, apparently not bothered by the admission. “So I thought of this instead.”

He tugged at one of the black lapels and the inside cloth revealed itself to be a vibrant amethyst.

“The lining is more visible on your great coat,” he added, opening the door of Brendol Hux’s wardrobe. He took the coat out, still on the hanger, and presented it to Hux with expectant eyes.

Hux took a step, arm extended, and let two pale fingers slide against the bright colour. The fabric seemed to absorb as much light as possible and to throw back only the most vivid of it. He looked at Ren, who told him quietly “The pigments are from Naboo. They are the privilege of royalty.”

Hux felt strangled. This didn’t feel anything like a cold calculation. This was a precious and personal gift. It had taken time to prepare, and this was happening, this was finally happening. Hux’s ears were terribly hot and he felt like a rash was creeping up his throat and his jaw.

He tried to speak but struggled, finding nothing to say that felt adequate. “It is…I…thank you Supreme Leader.”

Ren looked like this was enough. “Please… call me Kylo, not that,” he said, hanging back the coat on the top edge of the door. His shoulders were so broad he seemed to take up much more space than Brendol used to in the same room.

“Please, do not call me Armitage, call me Imperator,” Hux tried to joke but the situation seemed so surreal that it half died in his throat. It did seem to matter as Ren’s –Kylo’s- laugh in response was a bit monstrous.

“You look good when everything is going the way you want,” Kylo said.

Hux raised a doubtful eyebrow. “Really? I don’t feel like I look good, I feel like I’m having an allergic reaction.”

Kylo laughed again and then the room fell silent. They could hear some agitation coming from downstairs, some bleeping and droid noises, orders being barked and doors closing. In a little more than an hour they would go out and meet their destiny.

“Can I undress you?” Kylo asked with bashful eyes.

“I…Yes,” Hux said, letting his arms fall and his heart rate brutally rise yet again.

Ren took a big noisy step toward him. His large hand went to Hux’s collar and unbuttoned it deftly. While doing so, his fingers brushed Hux’s throat. He tugged at the fabric and made his way down. Hux didn’t really understand why Ren seemed to like having him naked, but seeing his concentrated face, it seemed very important to him. Was it about power? Having Hux at his weakest just before making him the most powerful man in the Galaxy?

Brow furrowed and bottom lip heavy, Kylo pushed the black uniform vest off his shoulders. Hux couldn’t repress a shudder as he took his time to look at his bony shoulders, their white skin and shadowy hollows. Then he felt his undershirt being tugged from his trousers, revealing his flat stomach and the dip of his navel. Hux raised his arms so Kylo could take it all the way off, and Kylo stretched the fabric so that it wouldn’t mess his hair.

His hands then went at the belt buckle. Kylo’s gesture being forceful so as not to be slowed down, Hux was unbalanced and had to take a step toward him. The strange man searched his face with hooded dark eyes.

“Go on,” Hux told him, keeping his voice very low. His cheeks were very red but his eyes serious as always.

Ren undid the buckle and unfastened the trousers. He bended a bit to drag them down Hux’s legs. He used his hands to ease the cloth around the knees, caressing the sparse red hair that was dusting the skin there. Then, half crouched, with Hux lifting his legs in turn for him, he removed the pooled pants from around the ankles, and the socks, throwing them two feet away, on Brendol’s secretary. It knocked off a few things and the noise of it startled Hux.

When Kylo got back up, he was standing even closer to Hux, his mouth slightly open in its usual way, the way that always made him look a bit dejected. “Sorry,” he said, giving a weird smile.

Then, he slithered his fingers inside the elastic band and pushed the breeches from Hux’s hips. Hux, feeling like a doll, put his feet closer together and it fell on the floor slowly. Kylo gave him a bit of space to step out of it but he remained close enough that Hux could feel the moisture of his breath.

The clothes were waiting on the bed, striking.

“You can touch me,” Hux told him, his voice cracked at the edge. “If you want.”

The moment pulsated between them.

“I want to,” Ren replied, sucking his lip between his teeth. Deliberately, one of his large hands went to press on Hux’s hip, fingers reaching toward the small of his back. Slowly, the thumb catching in the beginning of the pubic hair, it went to slide up his flank, the rough skin of his calloused palm against the soft skin of Hux’s always hidden body. It went up and up, advanced underneath his armpit and then between his shoulder blades, where the muscle was harder. Kylo took still another step forward and closed his fingers around Hux’s neck. Hux couldn’t help but hiss as he felt the rough material of Kylo’s black tunic press against his naked skin. Kylo’s other hand went to his shoulder while he slid the first one down again, following the path of the spine. When he reached Hux’s buttocks, he felt goose bumps underneath his fingertips.

“Do you like it?” Kylo asked in a raw voice, with his usual lack of tact.

Hux almost smiled then, even if the strangeness of the situation was still stifling.

“Yes…It feels…nice. To be touched like that.” Kylo knew he meant to be touched without purpose, without wanting to punish, to assess or to teach. To be touched at all, which hadn’t maybe happened to Hux in years.

“Do you?” Hux asked in return, not trying to meet Kylo’s eyes.

“It’s soothing.”

Kylo kneaded his ass for a while, relaxing his thumbs into the soft and yielding flesh. But Hux, bringing his hands to Kylo’s biceps, put a little distance between them. Kylo looked at him with mild annoyance at being interrupted.

“There too,” Hux said, looking pointedly down.

Kylo’s features mellowed out instantly as he reached out with eager fingers to caress the pink testicles and display the even pinker cock on his palm.

“It’s so tiny,” he said affectionately.

“How...big…is yours?” Hux managed to ask despite his embarrassment.

For a wild moment Kylo did nothing. Then he went to his own fly and Hux heart picked up the pace yet again. Kylo drew his cock out. In its half hard state, it was about five time the size of Hux’s.

“Hux,” Kylo said with a broken voice, “look at how different we are.” In one hand he was holding himself, and in the other he was displaying Hux. “Look,” he repeated, his eyes hungry.

“It’s beautiful,” Hux answered, holding Kylo’s shoulder for dear life. How on earth could Kylo be so big from everywhere? “Make them…touch,” he said.

Kylo let out a howling noise at that and let his forehead drop against Hux’s temple. Slowly, he brought the glistening head of his cock to leave a wet trail on the skin of Hux’s penis. Hux linked his fingers behind Kylo’s neck and pressed their tights together. Kylo let go of himself, pressing the tip of his erection into Hux’s stomach to free his fingers and drew Hux’s foreskin back with them. The bare head of his cock appeared coloured by blood and soft looking and Kylo pressed his thumb to it. Hux’s fingers dug deeper in his neck.

“Look,” Kylo said again as he brought their two heads together. It felt slick and pleasant to Hux, intimate and dangerous.

Then Kylo started to stroke himself, his own foreskin stretching back and forth in his hand along the length of his penis. After a little while, half grunting, he drew the skin forward enough to cover Hux’s tiny cock with it. Hux’s mind felt blank. He was absolutely out of his depth. Was that even something people did? It looked like a strange bridge between them.

“Touch me, please touch me,” Kylo asked Hux with an edge of desperation.

Hux took him and stroked him rhythmically as best as he could given the angle, pressing absent minded and wet kisses to seek comfort from his confusion, in the places where he could reach, near Kylo’s ear and at the angle of his jaw. It took only a few minutes and _it_ spurted from Kylo’s cock like an explosion and Hux felt like it went everywhere inside his penis, burning hot. His eyes were glistening with tears and he almost couldn’t breathe.

“Here, open your mouth,” Kylo told him, panting. He was still holding Hux flush against him.

With his fingers he brought to Hux’s tongue a salty fluid that prickled the soft mucous membrane of his mouth like strong menthol. Hux swallowed it with a grunt.

“I’ll be with you when you become Imperator.” Kylo said, cupping Hux’s jaw in the palm of his hand, his tone grave and earnest. He then left the room and Hux saw his naked reflection in a tarnished mirror, and the purple cloth of his Imperator uniform behind him.

* * *

 

There was no music, almost no sound expect for that of the falling rain and the wind. But there where thousands in the crowd.

Clad in black, right ahead of him at the end of the crimson carpet, looking like unmovable chess pieces, the Knight of Ren were waiting. Kylo Ren was the only one to have his face visible. His dark hair was moving wildly around his face but he looked impassible.

And the rain was falling and falling, half mist and half shower depending on the wind currents. The armours of the Stormtroopers that were positioned every ten meters to hold the line were dripping with it. Most of the assembly was holding holo-umbrellas and trying to look unbothered by the wet smell of fabric among them.

Hux, holding his word to Kylo, advanced bare headed along the path, chin high and hair slicked back. He started walking and felt no rain hitting him. He resisted the desire to look above him but saw looking ahead that the rain hadn’t stopped falling. It simply wasn’t hitting the floor of his path, but was instead pooling about three meters above the floor. As he advanced alone, a dangerous amount of water was accumulating and forming an ominous ceiling of water between him and the grey skies. People were looking at Kylo Ren fearfully, but their eyes where attracted to him, to the brightness underneath the black.

In the first rows along the way, Hux recognised familiar faces of his days here, at the Academy, of comrades who had remained lieutenants, of older officers who had once given him orders. Finally he climbed the few steps that led to the stage. The crimson carpet was heavy with water. Ren hadn’t protected himself from the rain like he had Hux and by now his hair was plastered against his skull. He drew a hand toward Hux, and pulled him to his chest when he took it. They staid in a half embrace for a moment, Hux acutely feeling the cold skin of the Supreme Leader and the eyes of thousands of people against him. When he let go of him, Ren nodded to his knights and they all fell to their knees at the same time, with a muted and powerful thud.

“General Hux is now Imperator of the First Order. I trust him to lead all my armies and all our efforts and genius to rule and restore civilisation in the Galaxy.”

He said nothing more, standing underneath the rain. Hux’s coat flapped in the wind, exposing more of the purplish colour of its lining. He bent his neck in acknowledgment and gratitude, and placed his fist on his heart. “Long may you rule, Supreme Leader Ren.”

Ren gaze turned to the assembly, vibrating with might. In the puddles and the mud, they all started to move and kneel, wave by wave.

The two things that occupied the forefront of Hux’s mind at this very instant were pure exultation and a deep burning in his penis. Kylo Ren had managed to ruin the day he had been working so ruthlessly for and also to make it more meaningful than he could have ever imagined.

Then the moment was over, as all things in life. The knights got up and drew their weapon in parade stance, and people in the crowd tried to wipe the mud from their sullied clothes.

When they had talked about how the ceremony should go, Hux had decided to share the celebration by giving decorations to various meriting soldiers and promising officers. So he left the main stage to go toward a smaller one were two dozens of his men and women were waiting ramrod straight for their distinctions. Captain Phasma was the first of them, her armour refracting even more light than usual, drenched in rain as it was.

Ren, walking beside Hux on the crimson path, ignited his lightsaber. Its vibrations created a prickle of fear even along Hux’s spine. Ren held it high, high enough so that it penetrated the ceiling of rain. Billows of whitish vapour emitted from the contact, half veiling Hux advance toward the stage. Only the red light was piercing enough to be seen by all. There was still no music, no whispers, only rapt attention and an undercurrent of unease.

Hux then distributed the new imperatorial decoration, a rectangle of amethyst barred by a black line, handshakes and words of congratulations. His lightsaber resting again, Ren oversaw it all without saying anything.

At the same moment, the liberation of five hundred war prisoners was announced to contribute to this day of celebration. The list of who could be allowed freedom had been carefully selected by a committee managed by Mikata and Bronmur so as not to be regretted in the future.

It was then time to leave. Palpatine wasn’t in the habit of giving too many speeches and Hux intended to reserve them for when they would say something that theatrics wouldn’t. The Stromtroopers pushed the crowd back from the path and Ren let go of his control over the water. It fell to the ground in brutal cascades. Ripples of exclamations of surprise were heard.

Only when Imperator Hux, Supreme Leader Ren, followed by the Knights of Ren and the elite Stormtrooper guard led by the glinting Captain Phasma, left the ceremonial arena in sleek black speeders did a thunderous fanfare start to play for the frozen and stunned crowd.

 

* * *

 

Late in the evening, in front of the quaint and crackling fireplace, Kylo was peeling his sodden clothes of his body.

After the ceremony, they had received all the Generals and Admirals of the First Order in the Great Hall of the Academy. This wasn’t meant to honour them but was organised by Hux so that Kylo could peer into their minds and see if one of them had the soul of a traitor. Then a banquet had been given for the Allied Leaders who had made the journey themselves. Most heads of State didn’t dare speak to Hux directly and instead addressed the officers working closely with him, but some approached him for long conversations of military and economical interest. No one spoke to Ren. After all the official obligations, Hux and Ren had walked back toward the house, two shadows letting the damp air clear their throbbing heads.

“Are you happy?” Kylo asked, seating half naked in a chair by the fire. He extended his long legs toward the flames. His toes were red from the cold.

Hux had followed him into his father’s room, too shaken by the day to want solitude yet. The choice of word puzzled him.

“Yes,” he said, warming his ungloved hands and not looking at Kylo. He didn’t want to be overpowered by emotion. “Although, I should call a medical droid.”

“Is it the rain?”

“I grew up here. I’m used to it. No it’s…I’m still burning from this morning.”

“Oh,” said Kylo. He got up to fetch a droid, not bothering to cover himself. Hux had a slight smile at the quietness of it compared to the grandiose day that had just unfolded.

Kylo padded back in, followed by wheels.

“How can I help you master Hux?” the droid asked, unperturbed by the undressed state of the Supreme Leader.

“If you could take a look,” Hux said, trying not to feel self-conscious unbuckling his belt and undoing his fly in front of Kylo yet again. “I have had a burning sensation in the genital area since this morning and it doesn’t seem to dull with time.”

“Surely, master Hux. If you could leave the room to provide us with privacy Master Ren,” said the droid.

“I don’t mind his staying,” Hux mumbled. He knew he could rely on the droid's confidentiality protocol.

He sat in the opposite chair near the fireplace and the droid adjusted its height to perform its occultation. It projected Hux’s medical file in blue light near him and directed intense light on his crotch. Slumped in his chair, Kylo was overlooking the procedure with no appearent awkwardness.

The droid bleeped and ventilated and finally asked “Did you ejaculate?”

Hux frowned. “I did not. I am taking class C hormonal suppressants.”

“I can detect seminal fluid on your skin,” the droid explained.

Hux looked at Kylo. “It is not mine.”

“I see,” replied the droid. “You should have told me right away that this reaction followed sexual intercourse. As it is, I do not detect any urinal infection, although they are quite common when engaging in sex after a long period of abstinence. I believe the burning sensation you describe is simply an effect of dermal irritation from contact with sperm, mixed with the effects of arousal. It can take a while being used to when on hormonal suppressors. If you intend on becoming sexually active, I would recommend cutting them off progressively to avoid any secondary effects. You should switch to class A suppressant to avoid pregnancies if you intend on engaging in heterosexual sex.”

Hux swallowed, embarrassment starting to warm him as much as the fire. He put his cock away and did his fly again.

“I see,” he said, looking down. “So there is nothing to do to ease the pain?”

“Bathing may help,” answered the droid.

“Keep this off my file,” Hux decided. “That’ll be all.”

Kylo closed the door after the droid

“I’m sorry,” he said, taking a cover from the bed and putting it over his shoulder. “I shouldn’t have been so forceful.”

Hux looked him in the eyes. “I wanted it as much as you did.”

Kylo slowly sat back again. “Can you take it out again please?” he asked. “I just want to look at it. To look at you.”

The fire was making Hux’s hair even redder than usual, and his skin less pale. Without asking any question, his long fingers pulled once again his cock out, through the opening in his black dress trousers. Its pinkish roundness exposed among the uniform gravitas was a sweet sight for Kylo, who moved his feet so that it would touch Hux’s ankle.

“I almost want to put ice on it,” Hux said, getting his balls one after the other on the cloth of his trousers as well. He looked away from his penis and smiled at Kylo. “But today was glorious. They were all in awe of you. And thank you for getting the Knights to come.”

Ren laughed a bit.

“What is it?” Hux asked.

“It just…sometimes life really doesn’t turn out the way anyone would have imagined,” Kylo said, like it was a good thing. They fell into companionable silence for a while.

Hux’s clothes went from wet to pleasantly dry and then he was feeling too hot. Feeling both ashamed and audacious, he removed his uniform like Kylo had done. Kylo was looking at him, sprawled in his chair. When he was entirely naked, Hux grabbed Kylo’s arm and pulled at it so that he would fell on his knees from the chair. Kylo let himself be led, taking the sight in. Hux closed the distance between them, his legs touching Kylo’s arms and smooth chest. He put his cock in front of Kylo’s face. Kylo smelt him and rubbed his nose against the skin of Hux stomach, and Hux tried to push his cock towards Kylo’s mouth.

“Wait, wait, I’ll give you what you want,” Kylo told him, taking his penis between two fingers to aim it better. His deliciously wet tongue went to lap at Hux’s slit, easing the burning almost instantly.

“This is…much better,” Hux told him, his fingers cradling the scalp underneath the glossy black hair. Kylo tongued at him conscientiously, looking at him through dark lashes. Then he sucked the whole penis inside his mouth, rubbing his cheek against Hux’s belly. He sucked and sucked, humming appreciatively and searching for Hux’s eyes, caressing his calves and the back of his tights. He sometimes let go of Hux cock to rub his nose in his balls, or to rest their weight on his eyelids, but always his hungry mouth returned to wet and swallow the burning.

“Do you need more?” He asked Hux from the floor.

“Not really,” Hux said. “It feels better. But I really don’t want you to stop.”

Kylo stood up awkwardly and carried him to the bed. The mattress bounced under their weight. Moving on all four, Hux came to straddle his face, his pubic hair rubbing against Kylo’s big nose. He looked over his shoulder and saw that an obscene bulge was distending Kylo’s breeches. His hand went to seize it. Kylo’s back arched immediately at the feeling.

Lifting him from the waist, Kylo got Hux crotch away from his face. “Slap my balls, please,” he asked in a wrecked voice. “And go deeper in my throat. Really sit on me.”

Hux settled back, his pubis flushed against Kylo’s nose and eyes, his balls prickled by the stubble on his chin. He trusted his pelvic muscles with abandon against Kylo’s face and, twisting his shoulder, he reached underneath Kylo’s breeches and pinched and slapped the elastic skin of his testicles. He felt Kylo’s muffled cry reverberating inside his penis and his stomach.

Kylo’s throat constricted around him and all his frantic and blind tension of muscles amounted to a diffuse but exquisite dry climax that diffused into an acidic and tingling feeling in Hux’s crotch. Kylo must have felt the spasm recede underneath his hands because he let him go, panting heavily. His face was dripping with saliva and awfully red from the lack of oxygen. Hux wiped Kylo’s mouth roughly with his hand and went to shove his tongue right where is cock had been. Kylo almost crushed him against his chest.

* * *

 

 

“ _Ben._ ”

 

The voice echoed everywhere. Kylo awoke with a jolt. But Hux slept on, unperturbed.

It was deep into the night. The skin around Kylo’s mouth was sore. Outside, the rain was still falling.

 

“ _What have you done, Ben?”_

 

The voice was echoing inside his head, it seemed obvious now. With unease, Kylo looked at the outline of Hux’s naked body. They were tangled and sweating together, their smells had become one smell underneath the covers and in the room. The old house’s air regeneration system wasn’t working properly.

“What have you done?” the voice repeated insistently, grating his nerves by echoing itself dozens of time. It was coming from everywhere in his brain, bouncing against his skull and scattering painfully in the recesses of his mind. Kylo forced himself to concentrate and calm down to zero in on the original voice.

Rey. His heart constricted at the realisation.

“What do you want?” he asked loudly.

He felt astonishment and anger before the response reverberated in his mind. “I can’t believe that this is what you chose to do after his death.”

Ren was immediately furious and didn’t try to contain himself even if it was painful to feel such untamed feelings from somebody else. “You have no right to say anything. You have turned from me.”

He felt Rey’s sigh everywhere in him. But he couldn’t see her. He tried peering with closed eyes.

“I was hoping you would change your mind,” Rey told him, her voice still holding passion. “That _you_ would come with me.”

“You lack vision,” Kylo snapped. He could feel his nose crunch up in anger. How dare she judge him when she had closed the door on him?

It hurt him when he felt the spite in Rey’s laugh. “Do you think it was visionary to make that awful man so powerful? I can’t believe you’ve killed Snoke only to create an Imperator of such a rat!” She had so much contempt for the man it almost felt pure. Kylo couldn’t help casting a glance to the sleeping form of Hux, the listless outline of his hip and the pink button he had felt so much relief at having in his mouth. There was a frown on his face and the covers were bunched up in his hand. Kylo wanted to touch him, and he wanted Rey not to feel disgust at him. But he could sense her horrified realisation pulsing through their bond.

“It’s not too late Ben,” she said finally, but he felt her sorrow most of all. Just like Han right before he died. Kylo said nothing in return.

When the silence fell again, loneliness stab at him. Shakily, he touched Hux, landing his hand on warm skin. But his body felt mute.

“Who was that?” Hux asked. His pale eyes were gleaming in the darkness, blinking.


	4. The Discord Sower

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Kylo is deeply troubled by what Rey has told him through the Force and can do nothing but hope he hasn't been completely manipulated by Hux.

Mitaka walked toward him with something akin to panic in his eye.

“What it is?” Hux asked right away, discarding his pad in the hands of another lieutenant. He had been back on the Finalizer for a few hours only and the enthronement on Arkanis already felt like a far away hallucinated dream.

Mitaka drew him in a meeting cabinet, away from peering eyes and curious ears. “I’ve monitored the Supreme Leader’s communication log as you asked, sir. General Organa has tried to contact him while you were planetside.”

“How did she know his code?” Hux asked.

“I don’t know sir. The IT team couldn’t find any trace of a hack.”

Hux stayed still for a few seconds and then sat at the auxiliary console. “Lord Ren, you have received an unusual call. Could you please come to command bridge?”

There was no response.

When Hux had woken at dawn planet side, Kylo was gone. Gone from the bed, gone from the house. He had tried not to read anything in it. He had checked the ship’s log and made sure that Kylo was on-board before jumping to the next point of interest in the galaxy, but he hadn’t seen him. He knew something must have happened during the night, but the more he tried to remember, the hazier the memory felt.

“Mitaka, request contact with General Organa from my personal code.”

“Very well sir,” Mitaka said, promptly taking a chair and dialling from the console. The call failed twice, but as Hux was about to leave the room, they were hailed back by an encrypted code.

Hux turned on his heels, arranged his collar and sat, back very straight, in front of the console. “Take it,” he ordered Mitaka.

“This is General Organa,” a voice said.

“This is Imperator Hux,” he replied, requesting visual.

It was denied. “Imperator Hux,” Organa’s disembodied voice greeted him after a moment. She was hiding her location in everyway possible. “It was my son I wanted to talk to.”

“The Supreme Leader is not available at the moment,” Hux answered daintily. “But I can deal with whatever you wanted to bring up with him.”

Organa let out a noise that stated clearly her scepticism. “I wanted to express my appreciation for the liberation of war prisoners during your… enthronement,” she said.

Hux sneered. “The Supreme Leader organised it as a day of celebration.”

“How nice of him,” Leia commented with no intonation. “However I was wondering about the status of one prisoner in particular.”

“And who may that be?”

Organa’s silence sounded like she had to swallow something very bitter. “Poe Dameron,” she said finally. “One of our captains.”

“Ah.” Hux answered. His hand went to his chin. “I’m afraid we cannot release this particular prisoner. However, if you have other names, you can send a list and my committee will consider…”

“Poe Dameron is important to us. I am willing to organise a trade.”

Hux leaned back in his chair. “I regret but I do not think that it is possible,” he apologised with something vicious beginning to distort his voice. “You see, following a grave diplomatic offence, your son made him choke on his own spit.”

When he heard General Organa’s breath hitch eons away, his heart jolted in pleasure.

“I’ll send you the list,” she managed to say, and her voice was even again.

“Please do,” Hux agreed magnanimously.

 

* * *

 

Kylo was dripping with sweat. The intense exercise and the heat emitting from his buzzing lightsaber had made him overheat and he was panting like a beast.

He was punishing himself for keeping on reaching out to Rey. He had tried again and again to get her to answer him. To talk to him again. He remembered acutely the elating sensation their touching of hands through the Force had provoked in him. Such a thrilling sense of hope and promise of power.

He had so hated the contempt he had felt from her when she had found him again in Hux’s home, in his father’s profaned bed. But she knew him. She knew how Snoke had sounded so seductive at first, and than had turned out to be tyrannical. Maybe she still held some tenderness for him and had wanted to warn him.

It was true that he had felt Hux overwhelmed by a kind of madness that night. The night that had followed the ceremony that made him the highest commander of the army. Kylo had thought that it was desire that was sparkling madly through him, but Hux was on hormonal suppressants. He shouldn’t even have been able to want sex in the first place. And he also knew that Hux’s cunning would stop short at nothing.

Kylo still believed he had taken the best decision possible; Hux was the best choice to lead the First Order. But he had to remember to distrust himself. Not to get caught to close. He had to.

He would manage Hux. He had to.

 

* * *

 

When Kylo got back from his punitive practice, still feeling the heat of his light saber on his brow, Hux was casually waiting in his quarters, sat on a chair with a pad in his hands. Artificial light was bouncing on his red hair and he was drinking tarine tea.

“General Organa called you,” Hux informed him as a greeting. Kylo’s heart skipped a beat. First Rey and now his mother? Unease pressed down on his chest.

“I don’t know how she got your contact.” Hux went on. “She wanted to have Dameron freed. I dealt with her.” He was radiating self-satisfaction, and the smell of it was pungent.

“What are you doing here?” Kylo asked roughly. Although seeing Hux here without being prompted was surprising in a not entirely detestable way, he needed space to think. He had always hated being crowded.

For a fraction of a second, Hux seemed at a loss. Then his eyebrow knitted together. “I…called you on the bridge. You didn’t respond.”

Kylo rarely responded to Hux’s prompt right away, so he didn’t really get why Hux was looking so baffled. “Thank you for the information,” he said, wondering how General Organa got his code.

Hux said nothing back.

At last, Kylo turned toward him. “Now if you don’t mind, I have things to do, Imperator.”

Hux was surprised at how offended he felt by the dismissal. “I thought your mother calling you was quite the news,” he said, not getting up.

“I have no mother,” Kylo replied. He would have thought Hux of all people would understand that.

“But aren’t you curious what an enemy leader had to say?” Hux tried.

Kylo didn’t even look at him. He was feeling something buzz at his temple from far away, an indomitable and insidious sense of distrust. He started to move, to occupy himself and not say anything that he could come to regret.

Hux stayed at Kylo’s desk for a few more minutes, but he ignored him in favour of going about his business in his room, folding fucking capes and putting away boots. So he stood up, trying to gather his dignity around him to leave. The man made no sense whatsoever. Hux came thinking of kissing him and he left wanting to slap his face. But it was an odd heaviness he felt in his chest when the door slid shut behind him with its usual noise, rather than a righteous sense of vindication.

 

* * *

 

He knew that Rey must be trying to play with his mind. Why was she learning to do that? It was definitely not a skill yielded by defenders of the Light side of the Force.

But still, Kylo could feel it. It was true that Hux was changing at an alarming rate as mere days passed. Something in him, something visceral was unravelling, something that made Kylo refrain from confiding in him. His co-commander. With the days that passed, even if it didn’t show in his leadership yet, Hux started to feel volatile and fickle. The tight control he always held on things seemed to sometime snap. They still met almost daily to discuss their on going affairs and strategies, and every time, across from the desk, Hux was looking at him like he was terribly offended by the mere sight of him.

Kylo was being civil with him, but as distant as he could. He didn’t want to peer into Hux’s mind and find out that he had been lied to, manipulated with a devious genius into giving Hux what he wanted. He simply couldn’t picture himself getting rid of Hux anymore. But he couldn’t allow himself to get too close and let himself be swallowed up entirely by the cogs of a perfectly executed plan. Hux knew emotions were his weakness. Kylo was refusing to reflect too much on what he was doing, and he was just letting things be. He had gotten sadly good at it.

He only saw light in Hux’s eyes again the day they forced the Bitirio merchant league to sign unconditional surrender of their fleet and freight operations to the First Order. It made his spine tingle. Hux not only took pride in his job, a job of conquest and destruction, he found joy in it. He could hear Rey’s whisper reverberate in his mind yet again. Maybe she was right. He had given a violent man too much power. He had brought Hux on the edge of his ambition, and tipped him the other side. He had created another monster like him. But he didn’t know if the though came from his own mind or from far away recesses of space.

 

* * *

 

Hux knew he would have mood swings. The medical droid had printed him a whole leaflet on the subject of withdrawal and hormonal unbalance. He carried light sedative pills with him if it ever became uncontrollable. But, although irritation at an order badly carried out was quicker to rise, or if hysteria was now tainting the edge of extreme tiredness, he still felt in control. He felt the emotions, but he also knew there were only that. Emotions. He still had room to manoeuvre in his mind, he could still see clear beyond himself and not get untangled in the biological reality of his body.

Still, being alone in his room for a rare hour, he found that he very much wanted to cry. He bit his lips because he hadn’t let himself sob since he was 6 years old.

If he was honest with himself, his work often made him want to cry, most often in pure exhaustion. But he never thought much about it. It was a bodily function, nothing more, a way to purge himself when he was infuriated. A sip of alcohol usually settled his nerves. This was different. Why was Kylo ignoring him?

Being with him in his family home on Arkanis, he had never felt so close to anyone. He was almost resentful against the memory. No matter how much he wanted to forget it, to take in the new status of their relationship, he couldn’t. Sharing unadulterated glory and then quietness and vibrant intimacy with a man he had always been defiant off had changed him. He had caught a glimpse at what he had always been longing for, a state were he felt powerful and not alone, a state where he could give the best of his mind to help someone else well-being and position, and not feel threatened by them.

So Hux distracted himself with ruthless conquests to bring as unspoken gifts to Kylo. He received every spectacular kill that Kylo made as such in turn, against all reason and for the sake of an old promise. He waited, with a sour rancour, but with a hope that refused to be crushed too. He was good at waiting.

 

* * *

 

“Sir, we have caught Resistance spies,” Phasma told him. She had requested that he came to the infantry headquarters for a matter of the highest importance. Hux had left the engineering meeting he was presiding without explanation and gone to her immediately.

“How many? Where?” Hux asked, walking toward the holding cells with her.

Phasma was efficient as usual. “Three. In the elite spacecraft docking area. They’ve managed to kill one trooper before being restrained.”

Hux frowned. “A surveillance tracker installation mission I presume?”

“That is our best guess, yes. Counter surveillance protocol is currently in progress.”

Stormtroopers saluted them hastily on their way, startled by the purple lining of Hux’s greatcoat.

“But we’ve found bugs of various ranges on them. A tech team is currently repurposing them to send out wrong locations when need be.”

“Good,” Hux approved.

Intruders from the resistance had been more and more reckless the last few months. The analysing department didn’t know if that was a sign of desperation or a sign of more soldiers being won to the cause. Hux had retrograded a few obviously incompetent officers. “Maybe yes, maybe no” answers infuriated him.

“We’ve put them together for now, but we will isolate them as soon as you have seen them,” Phasma told him.

There were two women and a man in the cell. Hux wondered idly why those rebels always seemed to be covered in soot. He eyed the man’s shaggy beard with distaste.

“Have they said anything of interest yet, Captain?” He asked Phasma.

“No, they are stubborn.”

Hux gave a knowledgeable snort. Of course. Rebels always thought themselves noble and self-sacrificing, but most of the time they didn’t have any training that prepared them for a situation like this. Stormtroopers were routinely trained to withstand copious amounts of mental and physical stress, but this was considered inhuman in the Resistance militia. So they broke easily.

“Water them.”

Phasma walked her armoured fingers on the control panel and water sprinkled on the prisoners on the other side of the glass. They hissed at them as they were being drenched, not yet understanding what was going to happen to them.

“Good. Now drop the temperature to minus 5° Celsius.”

It took the rebels a few minutes to begin to shiver in earnest. Hux checked his notifications to kill time. Still no invitation from Ren to join him for a debrief or a meal.

“They seem better sir,” Phasma informed him.

The three prisoners were hugging themselves as best as they could, shaking already, grinding their teeth to stop them from clattering. They were a sore sight.

Hux took a step toward the glass. “So, now that we have made you more comfortable, would you care to share the details of your mission and who assigned you to it?”

One of the women got up aggressively. “Curse you and the whole First Order!” She screamed at him knocking her fist against the window.

He laughed at her. “You and your derisory attempts to derail our conquest of the Galaxy are but flies to the First Order. You should think about the lives you are about to forfeit before throwing yourselves into such useless operations.” Then, magnanimously, he added. “We can let you call your friends to warn them away from launching similar missions.”

“We will never surrender hope!” the woman spat, her eyes enraged by the cold. Behind her the shaggy man looked overwhelmed. “Everybody knows your Supreme Leader will kill himself. Killing is all he knows. And _you_ , you are nothing but a rat that will be devoured by other rats.”

The certainty in the rebel’s voice startled Hux. Why should she count on Ren’s suicide to win the war? What kind of rumours was the Resistance spreading about him? That must mean Organa had condemned him. That was not something that would play in their favour. Hux linked his arms in his back to refrain his hands from shaking.

He breathed in calmly. “Captain. When their hands are blue, pour 40°C water on them. Repeat as many times as you see fit.”

Hux knew the temperature contrast made your fingers feel like they were breaking in a hundred pieces, like your skin was burned up to the bones, and like the bones were shattered inside your muscles, butchering them. “Or rather assign an intern to it. We don’t have anytime to loose with this scum.”

 

* * *

 

Kylo Ren had gone in after a few hours, when the rebels were shaking so badly they hardly remembered what an idea was, let alone what they were standing for. He had plucked names and gathering points from their minds like ripe fruits.

Hux came to hear the details directly when Ren asked him into their usual meeting room. It was the first time since they were back on board that they were using it.

“You didn’t tell me we had prisoners,” Ren told him when he saw him. He was not in his usual seat, but he was standing in a corner of the room, looking vaguely at a wall.

As it was only the two of them in the room, Hux let his incomprehension show. “I made sure you were notified.”

“If you had told me right away, I would have gone to see them with you.”

“I thought you wanted to be left alone,” Hux answered, trying not to let his answer sound like a reproach, but the sneer proved incontrollable.

“I want to be left alone with private matters. This was not a private matter.”

Hux took a deep breath and decided to take a chance. “We haven’t done things together lately. I acted to the best of my knowledge.”

“Evidently,” Kylo answered, turning around toward Hux with a calm that was beginning to crack. “You do not need any advice or assistance since your are the Imperator.”

“That is not true!” Hux answered hotly, visibly surprising him. “I have…missed you, since we went back from Arkanis.”

Kylo frowned immediately. “Do not lie to me, I can feel your mind calculating even as we speak.”

Hux seemed deeply annoyed at that. “I can’t stop my mind from working, you know that. I’m calculating to try and guess what the fuck is going on in your head! Since you won’t tell me anything!”

Hux brought his hand to his temple, as if yelling had made his head ache. “I’m fed up with all these rebels…” he mumbled, as if this explained his temper. As if it could hide his hurt. His _hurt_.

“You’ve missed me?” Kylo asked, wariness and uncertainty tainting his voice. His bottom lip was shiny with spit.

Hux sat and took his calming pills out with shaky hands, cursing himself. “Why, I guess this mean you haven’t missed me at all then,” he said. He looked abjectly dejected and his complexion was bordering on green.

“Should I call a med droid?” Kylo asked, vaguely panicked.

“No, I’m fine, this is a natural reaction.” Hux said, wiping his eyes violently. “Stars, how distasteful being human is.”

Hux was positively unravelling right underneath his eyes. It had the same feel as the process he had identified since the enthronement, the same feel of uninhibitedness tinged with dizzying dread, but now that he was close, he could smell the baffling truth.

“You’ve stopped taking the suppressants,” Kylo remarked, startled.

“I have.” Hux looked like he was on the edge of a nervous breakdown. He swallowed the pill. His eyes were red. “This is the first stupid thing I’ve done in years. Instead of getting off of class C, I should have upgraded to class G immediately.”

Class G hormonal suppressants were akin to chemical castration. Kylo knew it and he was shocked at how much Hux seemed to mean it. It was deeply unsettling to see him so undone.

“But why would you do that? Why did you stop taking them?” he asked, his voice rising in response to the waves of panic that were rolling of Hux. “I thought you wanted to retain control in everything.”

Hux rubbed at his eyes again, this time to hide his embarrassment. “I don’t know why the fuck I decided to do that. You had messed up my hormonal system already. I must have been high on bloody oxytocin.” He took a shaky breath. “You’re the first person I’ve ever wanted to be close to,” he said miserably.

Surprise broke in Ren’s mind like water reaching its boiling point. “You want to be close to me?”

Hux looked offended “Of course I wanted to be close to you. Did you think I was some kind of prostitute? I’m 33 years old and I had never had sex. With anyone.”

“I didn’t know,” Kylo whispered, looking utterly lost. “I didn’t know.”

“ _What?_ ”

Hux sat up violently. He walked to Kylo with furious eyes. “How did you not know? _You_ were the one to take me to my home planet, _you_ have given me this wonderful colour and _you_ have asked if I was happy! You’ve told me to call you _Kylo_.” Hux was panting, his feature distorted in pain. “I gave you my father’s ring,” he gasped with the last of his strength. “I’ve asked you to be on my side! To be mine. Haven’t I? Haven’t I?”

Tears were spilling from his eyes, messily, and he was ashamed not to be able to stop them. He felt his mouth arch down in an awful rictus.

Kylo got right back in his face.

“But it was a game for you!” He retorted with wild eyes. “A game to get what you wanted. I felt it!” His hand cleared everything on the desk, as if daring to be denied. “I know it. I felt the ambition in you, looming in every recess of your mind, obscuring anything else. I thought it was a good thing for the First Order, but I felt it stronger than anything else.”

“No!” Hux tried with a strangled voice. His feelings were much more complex than that. He tried to calm his breathing before adding. “Obviously, you haven’t looked deep enough! You can feel, you can see right now that this is not true. I didn’t have to wreck my hormonal balance now, did I?”

He tried to walk it off, but three steps farther he turned toward Kylo again, his whole face reddish and congested. “What would I GAIN by doing that? Not power that’s for sure.” He almost spat the last sentence, with a nastiness bordering on hysteria.

“How would I know?” Kylo shouted, breaking something invisible in the air around him, his question holding a degree of anticipation that was painful to bear. “People usually like me for three full minutes on average before they betray me or try to kill me. No one ever wants to be close to me.”

Hux's eyes, wide and colourless, looked like dirty pools of rain. “Well, I did! I do!” His spittle landed on Kylo’s eyelid. “I wanted to be with you. As a man. Not a drugged up shell of a body.”

“You wanted to have sex with me.” Kylo realised. “Properly. I thought you were going power mad, but what you really wanted was to have sex with me again.”

Even Hux’s skull was flushed by now. “I thought you wanted it too!” It sounded awfully desperate to his own ears but he couldn’t stay quiet in his state. “I just felt so good that night. I wanted you to swallow me so I could live in your throat forever. You sucking my dick was the best thing that _ever_ happened to me. And I was just made Imperator before that. For the first time in my life...”

Hux was cut mid sentence. He was yanked from where he was, obeying a pull different than the ship’s gravity system. He felt like he flew and then Kylo stifled him against his chest. Hux struggled to free himself. Kylo forced him flushed against him for a few seconds before releasing him. Hux slapped him hard across the face, one, two, three times. His hand stung so hard he had struck, and furious tears were spilling from his eyes.

Kylo welcomed the blows like they were kisses. His big arms locked around Hux again, unmovable, almost crunching. "I want it,” he told Hux and it sounded like he was crazy. “What you want to give me, what you've done for me. I want it."

“You don’t deserve it, you dreadful…”

“Thank you.” Kylo said, and it was the most heartfelt thing he’d ever said. “Thank you for wanting me. It means more than you could ever know.”

Hux could smell Kylo's skin, he could feel him begin to tear up too in his neck. He started to sob even more, overwhelmed, and hating himself for it.

"Stop crying,” Kylo told him, ridiculously because he was crying himself. “Stop crying, Hux. You're all right. You're with me. You're with me." He was stroking his hair, its beautiful colour, in rhythm with his words.

“Oh stars, I thought you didn’t want me anymore…” Hux said, his jaw feeling like a ton of brick with the crying he was trying to swallow back. Kylo took Hux’s face between his two large hands, feeling the burning tears against his skin, and kissed him, mouth open, thrusting his tongue inside Hux, deeply. He felt Hux’s sigh inside him, his slumped desperation, the smeared and never spoken, even to himself, hope that had led him to stop taking the suppressants and endure the chemical riot of his body.

The full understanding of what Hux had just admitted, of what he had just asked, was hard to dawn on Kylo. All his life people had discarded him. He had had his use for Hux, but still the man was sobbing- the imperator of the first order was sobbing- for him. He was holding on to him like he was precious, he had his mouth wide open to take as much of his tongue as he could give him, even as he was sniffing back tears and snot.

“I’ve missed you,” Kylo told him with fervour, breaking the kiss to speak right in Hux’s face. “I’ve missed you so much and I didn’t even realise it.”

“Me too,” Hux answered, exhausted.

“You are so brave,” Kylo said, looking at him, at his brow, at his mouth, in his eyes, with wonder. “I am supposed to be the strong one but you were brave when I wasn’t.”

“I was a fool,” Hux answered, his head spinning. “To risk so much for so little, for so unsure a thing…”

“No one has ever done for me what you have done. To trust in me against yourself. To love me, truly love me.”

Hux heartbeat rose violently and an awful blush invaded his face. “I never said that I…”

Kylo eyes were bulging with how much they felt. “You don’t need to. I feel the same.”

 


	5. The Prisoner

Kylo was training in the gravity room, with the highest setting available to challenge himself. It was a device the Facilities department had installed for the Knights of Ren. As they used the Force instinctively, free weights weren’t much of a challenge to them. Training with adjustable gravitational force allowed them to be effective even on the largest and most massive planets of the Galaxy. Stormtroopers in their black under armour, Phasma’s shiny blond hair among them, were running and lifting in groups in the room, providing a background sound of barbells hitting the floor and grunts of effort.

Hux had come with his pad and work to do. In a few days only he had picked up the habit of working in unlikely settings to spend more time with Kylo, and in a few days only Kylo had picked up the habit of always letting him now where he was. There was nothing quite like crying together in dismal confusion to feel closer to someone as it turned out.

Hux was only seating on a bench, but having the Imperator so near made most of the troopers uneasy. They were used to Ren brooding around and doing with his mind what ten of them had trouble doing with their arms, but Hux looming silently was somehow more intimidating.

When he was done assigning, approving, delegating and chiding, Hux set his pad aside and watched the black haired monster with a smirk.

“Let me try,” he said after a few minutes.

Kylo, in the middle of a set, got out of the cabin. His chest was covered in sweat and heaving. He was frowning, and asked a silent question by jutting his chin at Hux.

“I want to walk in there with this setting,” Hux explained. “You’ll push against it for me.” One corner of his mouth lifted. “With your mind.”

Kylo collapsed next to him, radiating heat. “Hux, this is dangerous. I haven’t tried it before, I’m not sure how it’ll go.”

“I’ll do it anyway. I know you can figure it out.” Hux shrugged out of his coat.

“Hux!” Ren said urgently, grabbing his wrist. His hand was moist and calloused through the magnesia.

Hux displayed an unsettling smugness in response. “I’m learning to let go. To stop wanting to control everything. To trust you. That’s the path toward greatness.”

Kylo didn’t look convinced. Stormtroopers were trying very hard not to look at them. “You of all people are clever enough to know that overestimating your abilities is a weakness.”

“My assessment is sound. You can do everything,” Hux objected with the tone he used to carry commands, challenging his opponent to try and refute him. “You can do anything you want to.”

“Alright,” Kylo agreed with a nervous reluctance.

Hux walked toward the cabin and opened the door without throwing a glance back. Kylo had to stop himself from asking him not to do it again. Hux went in, closed the door, and felt nothing.

Phasma, who had approached the scene to act in case of necessity, rose an eyebrow. She checked the control panel.

“It is at the highest,” she confirmed through the glass. Hux said nothing but looked smug.

Kylo was baffled. “I’m not even trying!”

“Yes, but you were stressing. You only have to care to succeed.”

Kylo was still perplexed, his lips parted. He swallowed visibly. “Get out now, please.”

Hux grinned. That was the first time that Kylo ever saw his features arranged this way. The sense of belonging it gave him had nothing to do with the Dark but everything to do with power and confidence.

 

* * *

 

Hux wanted to keep control over his mood swings during the time he had to endure the hormonal transition, so it was mostly time like this that they spend together. But now that they didn’t have to brutally fall into intimacy to create it, they discovered something akin to tenderness together.

Hux learned the feeling of Kylo’s calloused hands in his own, he learned to recognize the moods that the degree of aperture of his mouth indicated. He learned to associate the crackling sound of the lightsaber with security instead of fear as he was progressively let inside Kylo’s inner circle.

Kylo discovered the few pleasures that existed in Hux’s life: drinking tea while reviewing the notifications ranked less important, using Ithorian rose cream for his hands before putting on his gloves, listening to Glitz music during exercise, being warm when he slept.

They did not want to deprive themselves of the shy pleasures of a prolonged courtship, a dance that they had violently skipped in the beginning of their acquaintance, so unsure of themselves they were.

 

Everything seemed simple those weeks. It felt to Hux as if he only had to want and to reach out to get. Systems, leagues and pirates bowed before their fleet with a simple request. The Data team aboard the Finalizer proudly reported that the rate of conquest was at its highest in five years.

And when there was a need for a fight, Kylo came back to Hux bloody and elated, sometimes kneeling to announce a new victory so glad he was to lay it all at his feet. Hux had all his boots resoled in bright amethyst and walked all over the First Order, his limbs carrying a new strength.

People began to notice how their interactions had changed. “I fear I do not properly understand,” admitted, for example, the Grand Terabitte of ZX-789 while signing an alliance treaty on his own initiative, “do the Supreme Leader and the Imperator work as the Pope and the King on Old Rolognia? There doesn’t seem to be one above the other.”

“The Supreme Leader and the Imperator are two hemispheres of a same brain,” Phasma liked to explain. Or, to more mystical interlocutors, “they are two shadows of a same thing underneath a different light.” She enjoyed making her troopers parade on fallen planets and take measure of their new possessions. Hux had her featured in a lot of holovids. The distasteful slogan the PR came up with was “Greatness and Order know no gender.” He made them drop it and have her talk more instead. He was more and more considering the idea of making her the first General not to have gone through the Officer program of the Academy.

“Do it,” Kylo told him. “Better the Stormtroopers love you than the officers.”

“A lot of the officers worship the ground I walk on,” Hux retorted with a smirk.

 

So of course, in the face of this alarming progress, the Resistance retaliated by doing the only thing that could truly hit them: they captured Kylo Ren.

 

* * *

 

It was a stupid affair. He had been called because some Force sensitive children needed a master. He was to bring them to one of his knight for training and political education. Hux was thinking of creating an elite contingent of officers, to have Force users more integrated in the army. Kylo was doubtful about military integration but had agreed that Force users should not be left to their own devices.

But Rey had found them first and used them as bait. She had been clever enough not to confront Kylo openly, but had waited until he was asleep in the room of an obscure boarding house, in the city that had developed on third biggest crater of the moon he was visiting. Luke’s story had taught her something in the end. She came like a thief and injected a dreadful poison in him, a poison that cut him from the rest of the universe and forced him to rot inside himself.

It was humiliation more than fear that bit at his guts when he was brought to his mother in chains, a bag on his head and a perfusion bag of the stuff being pumped into his body. Apparently, Leia was the one who had instigated the research necessary to create a formula able to neuter or deteriorate the midi-chlorians in his blood stream and ultimately act as an injectable isolate to the Force. He didn’t even know that this could be done. Snoke had never spoken of such a thing. She must have started researching while I was still a child, Kylo thought bitterly. When he grew up and began to remind her of the father she never knew. She must have tested it on herself to make sure it worked. He could only guess at the components of the poison. Heavy metal. Mandalorian iron maybe. He felt blind.

Leia didn’t greet him by any name. He didn’t have any anymore in her mind. He hated her. He wanted her to try and turn him.

“You’ll be given a new perfusion everyday to keep you armless, so do not exert yourself by trying anything,” was the last thing she told him before the door of his holding cell was closed on him.

 

Kylo could not quite believe that mere days ago people flinched when he trampled the ground of their capitals, their senates, their palaces, their Stock Exchanges and research centres and made them sign everything over to the hands of Imperator Hux. And now he was restrained to a cell Stars now where, stripped down to nothing, his mind clipped and gelded. He thought of his father a lot, of the wrinkles on his face, of the hand that had caressed his own before he died. Before he killed him. But grief felt distant.

Leia stayed away from him, but Rey came to visit him several times. She still looked pure, but her face had hardened like a beautiful marble.

“Why didn’t you kill me?” he asked her once, for lack of anything else to say.

She frowned. “That is not our way.”

“Your way is undignified,” he said. “To deny me my nature. To kill me and keep me alive like this. It is degrading. I would never have done this to you.”

“Do not even try to talk to me about honour and morality,” Rey shut him up. “You have none whatsoever.”

Kylo couldn’t reach anywhere. He could only look inside himself now, and inside he could only see decay. He was like a plant denied the sun, whitening and degenerating into an abject creature which sole goal was survival. He presumed they must be in talks with the First Order, arranging or failing to reach some sort of deal, and that is why he was kept in this cell without being told anything. Or maybe he would grow old and die there, the midi-chlorians in his cells slowly withering and putrefying and any trace of a symbiosis with the universe disappearing.

But he thought of Hux often, and the familiarity of his mind made him think of using cunning instead of strength to find a way out, even if his attempts were only half-hearted. Trying would maybe get him free or get him killed, both of which were better than his present predicament.

One of his keepers had a dullness in his eyes that told him of pain unable to heal, maybe because hope was still gnawing at it. He treated Kylo with a kind of aloof contempt that cried his desire for some kind of vengeance.

It was him, Robb was is name, who clasped the heavy cuffs around his wrists and ankles and escorted him to the showers three times a week.

That day, when Robb turned away to allow him his modesty during his ablutions, Kylo rested his cuffs on the tap of the shower. He felt exhausted but resolute. He stopped breathing and pretended to be the victim of a fainting spell. With all the junk they were dumping in his system, that wouldn’t seem too unbelievable.

Robb was quick to catch his elbow and steady him. Kylo experienced skin on skin contact for the first time in days. It lasted a few seconds at most, but it was enough. Enough to slither into the mind of his keeper, as he had hoped he was still able to do. The man was easy enough to grasp. When he had what he wanted, Kylo shook his head, firmed his legs again. Robb brought him a stool to sit on. Swallowing humiliation, Kylo turned the water on.

“Imperator Hux would pay so much for me,” he said aggressively, his voice echoing against the tiled room. Robb hardly cast him a glance.

Kylo’s voice covered the sound of the falling water. “He’d give you a whole planet to rule over,” he declared forcefully, showing his crooked teeth. “He’d gave you anything you asked. All you have to do is help me. Get me off that dreadful venom. Or send the First Order my location. Whichever is simpler.”

Robb snorted. He must have been told not to show too much respect to his prisoner. To belittle him if possible, even. “Why would Imperator Hux give so much for you?” he asked, but his tone was knowing. “Or want you back at all? You have given him what he wanted already. Maybe he’ll just let you rot here.”

“What he wants is me,” Kylo said with utmost certainty, already stepping out of the shower and splattering water everywhere like blood. “He’ll make contact one way or another, you’ll see. Then you can remember what I have just told you. It could change your life. And the life of those you hold dear.”

 

* * *

 

“You cannot possibly be serious,” Rey said the next day. “Trying to corrupt your keeper with ridiculous stories of the Imperator’s devotion to you.”

She was seated on a chair in front of his bed, watching over the transfusion progress. They always chained him for this. He had tried resisting at first, but they weren’t afraid to tase him and it made it worse.

When Rey went out, she always took the chair with her. He couldn’t figure out why. A chair wouldn’t be much help to him. Maybe he could kill himself with it.

“They are not stories,” he answered darkly, looking at the needle in his arm. The liquid was thick and it hurt. It blackened his veins at the entry point. “You know it.”

Pity that Robb was a tattle-tale. Obviously he hadn’t had as much control on the Force left as he had thought. He had thought what Robb wanted in his heart of hearts would be stronger than his loyalty to the Resistance, especially with a little nudge. But no. How did Hux manage these things?

Rey didn’t contradict him this time. But her brow furrowed even more.

“Why? Why him?”

“Hux?” he asked, if only for the pleasure to hear the name. It echoed pleasantly on the bare walls around him.

Rey found him out and distaste was clear on her face. “Yes, _Hux_. Why him?”

She meant why him _when it could have been me. If you had chosen right._

Kylo gave her a mocking smile. “He makes me mad with something else than anger.”

 

* * *

 

As it turned out, Kylo was right.

As soon as he received the declaration that Kylo Ren was at the hands of the Resistance, the Imperator did ask for him through official channels, adorning his demand with assorted treats of mass murder. Leia had chosen to keep radio silence for several weeks in order to make desperation mature and fester and be in a better position to negotiate.

She responded that she was willing to make a trade: Kylo Ren for the complete retreat of the First Order from the three systems bordering Resistance space. The blue silhouette of Hux’s holo reproduction answered with a diligence that betrayed his eagerness to seal the deal, but he didn’t par with his usual complacency.

“Before anything is implemented,” he told Leia as if he was the one calling the shots, “I want to see for myself that he is alive.”

“We can provide you with a live feed,” she granted.

Hux browed furrowed with distaste. “Not good enough. I know how rebels would rejoice at the death of our Supreme Leader. I won’t be tricked.”

Leia couldn’t repress a movement of impatience. “You know he is my son…”

“And I know you are the kind of woman able to take tough decisions when need be. I’ll see him or nothing will be done.”

“Then you know I won’t be stupid enough to give you any location.”

Hux swept the objection with an impatient gesture. “I’ll meet your party at a predefined location and you can transport me from there with one of your ships.”

Leia waited a moment before speaking, torturing him. “We can arrange that.”

Hux face betrayed nothing. “I want a hundred hostage dropped at that same predefined location and sent aboard the Finalizer as security. I’m not stupid either.”

Leia looked as if she was about to slap him, but it passed like a shadow on her face.

“These are my terms,” Hux insisted, his tone icy. “I’ll come in person, unarmed, unaccompanied.”

 

 

Four hours later, he was standing in front of her, on the lush planet she had built her new base on. No less than eight Resistance soldiers flanked him and it almost looked like a guard around him.

Leia’s heart constricted in her throat when she saw his coat. The vibrant colour was dulled in the holovids, but it was unmistakably from Naboo. That must mean…

“Your son gave it to me as a gift the day he made me Imperator on Arkanis,” Hux said, following her gaze. This was yet another reminder that the man she was holding prisoner was her blood. She was tempted for a second to simply dispose of them both in the void of space and be done with it all.

“You’ve sworn I could see him,” Hux snapped when she didn’t answer anything. “You know I won’t hesitate to have those hundred hostages killed one by one if you do not keep your word.”

“Search him for any weapon or spying device before letting him enter the building,” Leia told her chief security officer. “Take his clothes if you have doubts. We can provide him with a prison gown if need be.”

 

* * *

 

Rey entered his room as she did every afternoon, with the tell tale swish of the door and her usual hypocrite greetings. “Good afternoon, Ben.” He looked up disinterestedly.

His breath caught suddenly. He distrusted what he had seen for a second. But no, this time she wasn’t alone. He saw the sneer and the pasty complexion first, the black uniform second.

“Hux.” He could feel his heart beat hard.

“Ben,” Rey began to explain, “discussions have been undergoing for a long time and Leia…”

Kylo rose from his bed, ignoring her completely. Right behind her was his Imperator, tired and grim, looking at him, looking him right in the eyes.

Rey was still talking, but Ren got past her in one towering stride, and went to Hux, his throat feeling sore just underneath the jaw. Hux. He was standing just in front of Hux.

They looked at each other, speechless for a moment.

Then Hux took the last step that separated them, and his hands grasped Kylo’s arms, squeezed them. “You look awful,” he told him, his pale eyes boring into him.

Kylo felt his breathing ease and deepen in anxiety at the same time.

“Hux,” he said again, voice full of wonder.

“What have they done to you?” Hux asked, and there was rising rage in the tempest of his brow.

Kylo shook his head dejectedly. “Please, just hold me,” he said.

Hux closed his eyes, willing himself to calm down. He tugged at Kylo until they were chest to chest, and let the whole side of his face rub against Kylo’s cheek. Kylo could feel a stubble that was new on his jaw as their skins warmed each other.

“I’ve missed you,” Hux finally said in Kylo’s ear, and it was almost inaudible because his voice sounded suddenly rusted.

“I’ve missed you too,” Kylo said out loud, almost cried, without any grace, and it echoed in the room. With a whimper, he hugged Hux tighter against him, breathing him in deeply. Hux slumped against him for a second, and his arms were full of the scratchy uniform.

Then Kylo had a sudden realisation and shoved him brutally. “Why did you come? You’re not that stupid! Now they have both of us.”

Hux seemed shaken for a second, but a smirk formed slowly on his lips as he rearranged his collar. He walked to Kylo again. “Why, I came to rescue you of course.”

His white skin tinted pink by blood, the darkness underneath his eyes, the neatness of his brushed back hair, and the sneer on his plush lips. Kylo had missed everything of him. It felt like a bit of life was coming back into him. He smiled despite himself, through the haze of his panic.

“Trust me,” Hux added, serious.

Rey was still standing in the room, mouth open, not knowing how to cut in on this exchange. She was supposed to monitor their conversation, as Leia had asked her. But they seemed far more familiar with each other than she had expected. She had been speaking to Ben for weeks now and she had never caught a glimpse at this thing his features could do.

 

“Alright.” Kylo squeezed one of Hux biceps playfully and smiled again, in appreciation this time. “I’m glad to see that you look well.” Being able to feel how he had hardened underneath his hands compared to when he was last on the Finalizer was good, but it was also painful. How much had Hux changed in that time, how much had he missed?

Hux looked down bashfully. “Not everywhere has grown as much,” he muttered.

Kylo chuckled, resting his brow against Hux’s. He wanted to cry at how much he for his part had waned instead of getting stronger.

“I’m sorry I made your life even more stressful,” he told Hux because he didn’t know what else to say. “I was tricked like a stupid boy and…”

“No, no,” Hux said, shaking his head with a tired smile. The small talk was helping them make light of the situation. Then, without any more preambles, Hux mouth went to his, to give him a kiss that said everything. Kylo received it with a moan, clutching at him and yielding with all he was. He had been waiting for it since he first saw Hux but wasn’t sure it would be given to him in this context. Now all his self-control was melting absurdly fast.

“I have to see you, to touch you,” he said against Hux’s lips, nose pressed against his cheek, “or I’ll die.”

“Are you mad,” Hux said, pushing against him, but not letting him go. The inside of his mouth was very red, pulsing with life.

“Hux.” Kylo said with such desperation that all Hux could do was to say “okay”, again and again, “okay” as he hugged Kylo to him, kissed him, and kissed him again.

 

* * *

 

“I volunteer to watch them,” Finn had said with resolve.

He hadn’t regretted any words more than those in his life. Kylo Ren had fallen to his knees in front of the dreadful Imperator Hux, not even throwing a glance at Rey when she left the room with wide eyes, flattening herself against the wall not to touch them, and he was now rubbing his face all over his crotch, eyes closed and lost to the moment.

“Fuck you for making me do this here,” Hux grunted, but his smile showed sharp teeth.

“I’ve been deprived,” Ren whined. “I’m almost dying here, don’t you see?”

Hux sneered, looking awfully pleased. Ren gave him back his smile in a devilish fashion and went straight to bury his nose between Hux’s legs. “And dreaming of doing this again so many times,” he added, his voice muffled. He breathed him in deeply and threw his head back. “I so, so want to see you.” His eyes were seeking permission.

“You know it’s yours,” Hux answered.

Ren mouth went slack when he exposed Hux’s penis with eager hands. It was still small and pinkish, not very hard. “Oh,” was all he said. Hux chuckled. _Chuckled_.

Finn thought something had ruptured in his brain. “I don’t believe it! He knows there are cams! Is he going to…”

“Seems so…” Rose answered.

Finn’s lip curled. “Is it some kind of twisted power play or…”

In the cell, Hux and Ren didn’t seem to care about any spectator, or anything else anymore.

“I told you,” Hux told Ren without shame. “Not very big yet.”

“It’s perfect,” Ren answered. He kissed Hux there, on the plump head and on his testicles, and when Hux hand went into his hair, he began to tongue at the slit with delight.

“Stars,” Finn muttered, dying with embarrassment.

“Isn’t the Imperator’s wiener…really small?” Rose remarked with her usual candour.

“First Order officers take hormonal suppressants,” Finn scoffed. “For all their displays of power, they are basically eunuchs.”

Nothing could be seen anymore as Kylo Ren had put everything in his mouth. He had swallowed greedily and was sucking with pure abandon. After a few minutes, grunting and panting with pleasure, his face lost to the world and his eyelids twitching, half sitting on the bed and holding himself on his elbows, Hux crossed his legs around Ren’s head, stifling him. Ren let out a long howl of pleasure, one hand grasping Hux’s thighs to keep him in place and the other going inside his own loose white pants.

“How is he still breathing?” someone muttered on Finn’s left. People in the surveillance room would have given anything to break the uneasy silence among them, a silence that made the noises coming from the cell sound even cruder. The minutes seemed to stretch and stretch, lasting forever in the oppressiveness of the muffled cries of pleasure. War was a funny business indeed.

They all had a movement of recoil when the Imperator seemed to reach his climax and Ren’s eyes widened with surprise and pleasure as sperm flooded his mouth. His face looked as if it tasted like life itself, the very life that had been slowly seeping out of him.

He kept the seminal fluid and the soft head of Hux’s cock in his mouth for a moment, leaking some of it with his smile, watching the satisfied face of Hux, hued by pleasure. Then he opened his mouth to let him see and made a show of swallowing it all. Hux messed with his hair as if to congratulate him and he hissed when Ren went to lick him clean. When he was done, Kylo tugged on Hux’s arms so that he would come down from the bed to sit on his lap. “Wonderful,” he said. He hadn’t used this word in maybe twenty years. There was a damp spot on the cloth of his pants. Hux didn’t bother trying to cover himself, he was laughing without laughing, his tongue polishing his teeth. He kissed Ren deeply again.

Everyone that had been watching them on the screen monitor was now incapable of meeting anyone else’s eyes. Someone cleared their throat.

“It doesn’t look like power play to me,” Rose finally said. “It looks like… they are in love.”

“Don’t be stupid,” Finn answered, gulping down “These men cannot love.”

 

* * *

 

The eight guards brutally entered the room while Hux and Kylo were still clinging to each other.

“The General didn’t grant you a matrimonial visit!” one of them berated Hux. It was easier to despise the Imperator when he had his pants undone than when he was looking down at you with a vile sneer. Hux glanced at the cam visor hanging in the corner of the cell while Kylo scrambled to his feet, putting himself between him and his captors.

“We are not done yet, leave!” he demanded with outrage, spit flying from his mouth. The first soldier to hold the line brushed some of it with a look of deep distaste from her lapels.

“We are here to escort the Imperator out,” she said. “For everyone’s sake, let him exit the cell quietly.”

Hux understood that they had shown themselves as humans plagued with base needs and had damaged some of the prestige that endowed them with the ability to terrify others into inaction. Kylo was so used to relying on his strength alone that he didn’t stop to care. Soon he was shoving at the eight of them and yelling, and no one dared to try and tase him, for fear of hitting the Imperator as well and thus risk to endanger the hostages.

Robb had seen the video too, or heard a disturbingly complete report. He agreed with Rose’s analysis. He took the hardest decision of his life. Drenched in fear, carrying a medical plate to make himself look busy, he managed to slip inside the busy room. The undergoing situation was so embarrassing and messy for everyone involved that he was not stopped.

“I have to administer Lord Ren his medicine, for everyone’s safety!” he shrieked, elbowing his way to Kylo. The words created a barely repressed movement of recoil among his comrades. Each one of them had been briefed at length about Kylo Ren’s abilities with the Force and how it was paramount they stayed bridled.

Hux, still hastily covering himself, still found time to rise an eyebrow at how undisciplined all Organa’s personal was. How she could still be a threat to him when she couldn’t institute a rational schedule on her base was a miracle.

Robb, in his nervousness, almost tripped and spilled his metallic plate at Kylo’s feet. A steel box opened with a banging noise and he scrambled to catch its contents. Then he drew a syringe with worried hands, but Kylo didn’t balk away. He had seen what was in the box. What Robb was currently pushing at him with his foot with barely any discretion.

Kylo looked at the cold metallic handle pushed against his ankle with a look of incredulity. He really thought he had failed. It took him a second to read the rumpled note that was pressed in his hand when Robb injected him with physiological serum. It said _Hangar 8, deck 12. I’ll be gone in ten minutes, whatever happens._

Hux, who was still smiling when Robb left hurriedly the room and forced the soldiers to break their formation, shut his mouth when he saw Kylo bend down and get up with his lightsaber. When he ignited it and the white walls turned red, Hux didn’t flinch away from him. Trust Ren to turn any situation into utter chaos. The rebels were now drawing their blasters and screaming.

Hux did of course have his own plan, much more carefully constructed, to get Ren out of here, but the idea of showing Leia she could be betrayed and let her soldiers die at home appealed to him immensely. It was also important for Kylo’s self-esteem to be able to take back control of the situation. What Hux was holding against the Resistance would get them out of any situation anyway. So he went up at Kylo’s shoulder and shouted with the long practice of command: “Kill them! Kill them all!”


End file.
